The Condition of Labor
An Open Letter to Pope Leo XIII

Men of
Rome! you are called the lords of the world, yet have no right to a square
foot of its soil! The wild beasts have their dens, but the soldiers of
Italy have only water and air!

Tiberius Gracchus

New York, September 11, 1891

To Pope Leo XIII
Your Holiness—

I have read with
care your Encyclical letter on the condition of labor, addressed, through
the Patriarchs, Primates, Archbishops, and Bishops of your faith, to
the Christian world.
Since its most strikingly pronounced
condemnations are directed against a theory which we who hold it know
to be deserving of your support, I ask permission to lay before your
Holiness the grounds of our belief, and to set forth some considerations
that you have unfortunately overlooked. The momentous seriousness of
the facts you refer to, the poverty, suffering, and seething discontent
that pervade the Christian world, the danger that passion may lead ignorance
in a blind struggle against social conditions rapidly becoming intolerable,
are my justification.

I

Our postulates are
all stated or implied in your Encyclical. They are the primary perceptions
of human reason, the fundamental teachings of the Christian faith.

We hold: That—
This world is the creation of God.

The men brought
into it for the brief period of their earthly lives are the equal creatures
of his bounty, the equal subjects of his provident care.
By his constitution, man is beset by
physical wants, on the satisfaction of which depend not only the maintenance
of his physical life, but also the development of his intellectual and
spiritual life.
God has made the satisfaction of these
wants dependent on man's own exertions, giving him the power, and laying
on him the injunction, to labor—a power that of itself raises him far
above the brute, since we may reverently say that it enables him to become,
as it were, a helper in the creative work.

God has not put
on man the task of making bricks without straw. With the need for labor
and the power to labor He has also given to man the material for labor.
This material is land—man physically being a land animal, who can live
only on and from land, and can use other elements, such as air, sunshine,
and water, only by the use of land.
Being the equal creatures of the Creator,
equally entitled under His providence to live their lives and satisfy
their needs, men are equally entitled to the use of land, and any adjustment
that denies this equal use of land is morally wrong.

As to right of ownership, we hold:
That—
Being created individuals, with individual
wants and powers, men are individually entitled (subject, of course,
to the moral obligations that arise from such relations as that of the
family) to the use of their own powers and the enjoyment of the results.
There thus arises, anterior to human
law, and deriving its validity from the law of God, a right of private
ownership in things produced by labor—a right that the possessor may
transfer, but of which to deprive him without his will is theft.
This right of property, originating
in the right of the individual to himself, is the only full and complete
right of property. It attaches to things produced by labor, but cannot
attach to things created by God.
Thus, if a man take a fish from the
ocean he acquires a right of property in that fish, which exclusive right
he may transfer by sale or gift. But he cannot obtain a similar right
of property in the ocean so that he may sell it, or give it, or forbid
others to use it.
Or, if he set up a windmill, he acquires
a right of property in the things such use of wind enables him to produce.
But he cannot claim a right of property in the wind itself so that
he may sell it or forbid others to use it.
Or, if he cultivate grain, he acquires
a right of property in the grain his labor brings forth. But he cannot
obtain a similar right of property in the sun, which ripened it or the
soil on which it grew. For these things are of the continuing gifts
of God to all generations of men, which all may use, but none may claim
as his alone.
To attach to things created by God
the same right of private ownership that justly attaches to things
produced by labor is to impair and deny the true rights of property.
For a man who, out of the proceeds of his labor, is obliged to pay another
man for the use of ocean or air or sunshine or soil, all of which are to
men involved in the single term land, is in this deprived of his rightful
property, and thus robbed.

As to the use of land, we hold: That—
While the right of ownership that justly
attaches to things produced by labor cannot attach to land, there may
attach to land a right of possession. As your Holiness says, "God has
granted the earth to mankind in general, not in the sense that all without
distinction can deal with it as they please," and regulations necessary
for its best use may be fixed by human laws. But such regulations must conform
to the moral law—must secure to all equal participation in the advantages
of God's general bounty. The principle is the same as where a human father
leaves property equally to a number of children. Some of the things thus
left may be incapable of common use or of specific division. Such things
may properly be assigned to some of the children, but only under condition
that the equality of benefit among them all be preserved.
In the rudest social state, while industry
consists in hunting, fishing, and gathering the spontaneous fruits
of the earth, private possession of land is not necessary. But as men
begin to cultivate the ground and expend their labor in permanent works,
private possession of the land on which labor is thus expended is needed
to secure the right of property in the products of labor. For who would
sow if not assured of the exclusive possession needed to enable him to
reap? Who would attach costly works to the soil without such exclusive
possession of the soil as would enable him to secure the benefit?
This right of private possession in
things created by God is, however, very different from the right of private
ownership in things produced by labor. The one is limited, the other
unlimited, save in cases when the dictate of self-preservation terminates
all other rights. The purpose of the one, the exclusive possession of
land, is merely to secure the other, the exclusive ownership of the products
of labor; and it can never rightfully be carried so far as to impair or
deny this. While anyone may hold exclusive possession of land so far as
it does not interfere with the equal rights of others, he can rightfully
hold it no further.
Thus Cain and Abel, were there only
two men on earth, might by agreement divide the earth between them. Under
this compact each might claim exclusive right to his share as against the
other. But neither could rightfully continue such claim against the next
man born. For since no one comes into the world without God's permission,
his presence attests his equal right to the use of God's bounty. For them
to refuse him any use of the earth, which they had divided between them
would therefore be for them to commit murder. And for them to refuse him
any use of the earth unless by laboring for them, or by giving them part
of the products of his labor he bought it of them would be for them to commit
theft.

God's laws do not change. Though their
applications may alter with altering conditions, the same principles
of right and wrong that hold when men are few and industry is rude,
also hold amid teeming populations and complex industries. In our cities
of millions and our states of scores of millions, in a civilization
where the division of labor has gone so far that large numbers are hardly
conscious that they are land users, it still remains true that we are
all land animals and can live only on land, and that land is God's bounty
to all, of which no one can be deprived without being murdered, and for
which no one can be compelled to pay another without being robbed. But even
in a state of society where the elaboration of industry and the increase
of permanent improvements have made the need for private possession of land
widespread, there is no difficulty in conforming individual possession with
the equal right to land. For as soon as any piece of land will yield to
the possessor a larger return than is had by similar labor on other land,
a value attaches to it, which is shown when it is sold or rented. Thus the
value of the land itself, irrespective of the value of any improvements
in or on it, always indicates the precise value of the benefit to which
all are entitled in its use, as distinguished from the value, which, as
producer or successor of a producer, belongs to the possessor in individual
right.
To combine the advantages of private
possession with the justice of common ownership, it is only necessary,
therefore, to take for common uses what value attaches to land irrespective
of any exertion of labor on it. The principle is the same as in the
case referred to, where a human father leaves equally to his children
things not susceptible of specific division or common use. In that case,
such things would be sold or rented, and the value equally applied.
It is on this common-sense principle
that we, who term ourselves single tax men, would have the community
act.
We do not propose to assert equal rights
to land by keeping land common, letting anyone use any part of it at
any time. We do not propose the task, impossible in the present state
of society, of dividing land in equal shares; still less the yet more
impossible task of keeping it so divided.
We propose—leaving land in the private
possession of individuals, with full liberty on their part to give,
sell, or bequeath it—simply to levy on it for public uses a tax that
shall equal the annual value of the land itself, irrespective of the
use made of it or the improvements on it. And since this would provide
amply for the need of public revenues, we would accompany this tax on
land-values with the repeal of all taxes now levied on the products and
processes of industry—which taxes, since they take from the earnings of
labor, we hold to be infringements of the right of property.
This we propose, not as a cunning device
of human ingenuity, but as a conforming of human regulations to the
will of God.
God cannot contradict himself nor impose
on his creatures laws that clash.
If it be God's command to men that
they should not steal—that is to say, that they should respect the right
of property which each one has in the fruits of his labor;
And if he be also the Father of all
men, who, in His common bounty, has intended all to have equal opportunities
for sharing;
Then, in any possible stage of human
civilization, however elaborate, there must be some way in which the
exclusive right to the products of industry may be reconciled with the
equal right to land.
If the Almighty be consistent with
Himself, it cannot be, as say those socialists referred to by you, that
in order to secure the equal participation of men in the opportunities
of life and labor, we must ignore the right of private property. Nor yet
can it be, as you yourself in the Encyclical seem to argue, that to secure
the right of private property, we must ignore the equality of right in
the opportunities of life and labor. To say the one thing or the other
is equally to deny the harmony of God's laws.
But the private possession of land,
subject to the payment to the community of the value of any special advantage
thus given to the individual, satisfies both laws, securing to all equal
participation in the bounties of the Creator, and to each the full ownership
of the products of his labor.

Nor do we hesitate to say that this
way of securing the equal right to the bounty of the Creator and the
exclusive right to the products of labor is the way intended by God for
raising public revenues; for we are not atheists, who deny God, nor semi-atheists
who deny that he has any concern in politics and legislation.
It is true, as you say—a salutary truth
too often forgotten—that "man is older than the state, and he holds
the right of providing for the life of his body prior to the formation
of any state." Yet, as you too perceive, it is also true that the state
is in the divinely appointed order. For He who foresaw all things, and
provided for all things, foresaw and provided that with the increase
of population and the development of industry, the organization of human
society into states or governments would become both expedient and necessary.
No sooner does the state arise than,
as we all know, it needs revenues. This need for revenues is small at
first, while population is sparse, industry rude, and the functions of
the state few and simple. But with growth of population and advance of
civilization, the functions of the state increase, and larger and larger
revenues are needed.
Now, He that made the world and placed
man in it, He that pre-ordained civilization as the means whereby man
might rise to higher powers and become more and more conscious of the
works of his Creator, must have foreseen this increasing need for state
revenues, and have made provision for it. That is to say: The increasing
need for public revenues with social advance being a natural, God-ordained
need, there must be a right way of raising them—some way that we can truly
say is the way intended by God. It is clear that this right way of raising
public revenues must accord with the moral law.
Hence:
It must not take from individuals what
rightfully belongs to individuals.
It must not give some an advantage
over others, as by increasing the prices of what some have to sell
and others must buy.
It must not lead men into temptation,
by requiring trivial oaths, by making it profitable to lie, to swear
falsely, to bribe, or to take bribes.
It must not confuse the distinctions
of right and wrong and weaken the sanctions of religion and the state,
by creating crimes that are not sins and punishing men for doing what
in itself they have an undoubted right to do.
It must not repress industry. It must
not check commerce. It must not punish thrift. It must offer no impediment
to the largest production and the fairest division of wealth.
Let me ask your Holiness to consider
the taxes on the processes and products of industry by which, through
the civilized world, public revenues are collected—the octroi duties
that surround Italian cities with barriers; the monstrous customs duties
that hamper intercourse between so-called Christian states; the taxes
on occupations, on earnings, on investments, on the building of houses,
on the cultivation of fields, on industry and thrift in all forms. Can
these be the ways God has intended that governments should raise the means
they need? Have any of them the characteristics indispensable in any plan
we can deem a right one?
All these taxes violate the moral law.
They take by force what belongs to the individual alone; they give
to the unscrupulous an advantage over the scrupulous; they have the
effect, nay, are largely intended, to increase the price of what some
have to sell and others must buy; they corrupt government; they make
oaths a mockery; they shackle commerce; they fine industry and thrift;
they lessen the wealth that men might enjoy, and enrich some by impoverishing
others.
Yet what most strikingly shows how
opposed to Christianity is this system of raising public revenues is
its influence on thought.
Christianity teaches us that all men
are brethren; that their true interests are harmonious, not antagonistic.
It gives us, as the golden rule of life, that we should do to others
as we would have others do to us. But out of the system of taxing the
products and processes of labor, and out of its effects in increasing
the price of what some have to sell and others must buy, has grown the
theory of "protection", which denies this gospel, which holds Christ ignorant
of political economy, and proclaims laws of national well-being utterly
at variance with His teaching. This theory sanctifies national hatreds;
it inculcates a universal war of hostile tariffs; it teaches peoples that
their prosperity lies in imposing on the productions of other peoples restrictions
they do not wish imposed on their own; and instead of the Christian doctrine
of man's brotherhood, it makes injury of foreigners a civic virtue.
"By their fruits ye shall know them."
Can anything more clearly show that to tax the products and processes
of industry is not the way God intended public revenues to be raised?
But to consider what we propose—the
raising of public revenues by a single tax on the value of land, irrespective
of improvements—is to see that in all respects this does conform to the
moral law.
Let me ask your Holiness to keep in
mind that the value we propose to tax, the value of land irrespective
of improvements, does not come from any exertion of labor or investment
of capital on or in it—the values produced in this way being values of
improvements, which we would exempt. The value of land, irrespective
of improvement, is the value that attaches to land by reason of increasing
population and social progress. This is a value that always goes to the
owner as owner, and never does, and never can, go to the user; for if
the user be a different person from the owner, he must always pay the
owner for it in rent or in purchase-money; while if the user be also
the owner, it is as owner, not as user, that he receives it, and by selling
or renting the land he can, as owner, continue to receive it after he
ceases to be a user.
Thus taxes on land irrespective of
improvement cannot lessen the rewards of industry, nor add to prices,(1) nor in any way take from the individual
what belongs to the individual. They can only take the value that attaches
to land by the growth of the community, and which therefore belongs to
the community as a whole.

To take land-values
for the state, abolishing all taxes on the products of labor, would
therefore leave to the laborer the full produce of labor, to the individual
all that rightfully belongs to the individual. It would impose no burden
on industry, no check on commerce, no punishment on thrift; it would
secure the largest production and the fairest distribution of wealth,
by leaving men free to produce and to exchange as they please, without
any artificial enhancement of prices; and by taking for public purposes
a value that cannot be carried off, that cannot be hidden, that of all
values is most easily ascertained and most certainly and cheaply collected,
it would enormously lessen the number of officials, dispense with oaths,
do away with temptations to bribery and evasion, and abolish man-made crimes
in themselves innocent.
But further: That God has intended
the state to obtain the revenues it needs by the taxation of land-values,
is shown by the same order and degree of evidence that shows that God
has intended the milk of the mother for the nourishment of the babe.
See how close is the analogy. In that
primitive condition, ere the need for the state arises, there are no
land-values. The products of labor have value, but in the sparsity of
population, no value as yet attaches to land itself. But as increasing
density of population and increasing elaboration of industry necessitate
the organization of the state, with its need for revenues, value begins
to attach to land. As population still increases and industry grows more
elaborate, so the needs for public revenues increase. And at the same
time and from the same causes, land-values increase. The connection is
invariable. The value of things produced by labor tends to decline with
social development, since the larger scale of production and the improvement
of processes tend steadily to reduce their cost. But the value of land,
on which population centers, goes up and up. Take Rome, or Paris, or London,
or New York, or Melbourne. Consider the enormous value of land in such
cities, as compared with the value of land in sparsely settled parts of
the same countries. To what is this due? Is it not due to the density and
activity of the populations of those cities—to the very causes that require
great public expenditure for streets, drains, public buildings, and all
the many things needed for the health, convenience, and safety of such
great cities? See how, with the growth of such cities, the one thing that
steadily increases in value is land; how the opening of roads, the building
of railways, the making of any public improvement, adds to the value of
land. Is it not clear that here is a natural law—that is to say, a tendency
willed by the Creator? Can it mean anything else than that He who ordained
the state with its needs has, in the values which attach to land, provided
the means to meet those needs?

That it does mean
this and nothing else is confirmed if we look deeper still, and inquire
not merely as to the intent, but as to the purpose of the intent. If
we do so, we may see in this natural law, by which land-values increase
with the growth of society, not only such a perfectly adapted provision
for the needs of society as gratifies our intellectual perceptions by showing
us the wisdom of the Creator, but a purpose, with regard to the individual,
that gratifies our moral perceptions by opening to us a glimpse of His beneficence.
Consider: Here is a natural law by
which, as society advances, the one thing that increases in value is
land—a natural law by virtue of which all growth of population, all advance
of the arts, all general improvements of whatever kind, add to a fund
that both the commands of justice and the dictates of expediency prompt
us to take for the common uses of society. Now, since increase in the fund
available for the common uses of society is increase in the gain that goes
equally to each member of society, is it not clear that the law by which
land-values increase with social advance, while the value of the products
of labor does not increase, tends, with the advance of civilization, to
make the share that goes equally to each member of society more and more
important as compared with what goes to him from his individual earnings,
and thus to make the advance of civilization lessen relatively the differences
that, in a ruder social state, must exist between the strong and the weak,
the fortunate and the unfortunate? Does it not show the purpose of the
Creator to be that the advance of man in civilization should be an advance
not merely to larger powers but to a greater and greater equality, instead
of what we, by our ignoring of His intent, are making it: an advance
towards a more and more monstrous inequality?

That the value attaching to land with
social growth is intended for social needs is shown by the final proof.
God is indeed a jealous God in the sense that nothing but injury and disaster
can attend the effort of men to do things other than in the way He has
intended; in the sense that, where the blessings He proffers to men are
refused or misused, they turn to evils that scourge us. And just as for
the mother to withhold the provision that fills her breast with the birth
of the child is to endanger physical health, so for society to refuse
to take for social uses the provision intended for them is to breed social
disease.

For refusal to
take for public purposes the increasing values that attach to land
with social growth is to necessitate the getting of public revenues
by taxes that lessen production, distort distribution, and corrupt society.
It is to leave some to take what justly belongs to all; it is to forgo
the only means by which it is possible, in an advanced civilization, to
combine the security of possession that is necessary to improvement with
the equality of natural opportunity that is the most important of all
natural rights. It is thus, at the basis of all social life, to set up
an unjust inequality between man and man, compelling some to pay others
for the privilege of living, for the chance of working, for the advantages
of civilization, for the gifts of their God. But it is even more than this.
The very robbery that the masses of men thus suffer gives rise in advancing
communities to a new robbery. For the value that, with the increase of population
and social advance, attaches to land being suffered to go to individuals
who have secured ownership of the land, it prompts to a forestalling of
and speculation in land wherever there is any prospect of advancing population
or of coming improvement, thus producing an artificial scarcity of the natural
elements of life and labor, and a strangulation of production that shows
itself in recurring spasms of industrial depression as disastrous to the
world as destructive wars. It is this that is driving men from the old countries
to the new countries, only to bring there the same curses. It is this that
causes our material advance not merely to fail to improve the condition of
the mere worker, but to make the condition of large classes positively worse.
It is this that, in our richest Christian countries, is giving us a large
population whose lives are harder, more hopeless, more degraded than those
of the veriest savages. It is this that leads so many men to think that God
is a bungler and is constantly bringing more people into his world than
he has made provision for, or that there is no God, and that belief in Him
is a superstition, which the facts of life and the advance of science are
dispelling.
The darkness in light, the weakness
in strength, the poverty amid wealth, the seething discontent foreboding
civil strife, that characterize our civilization of today, are the
natural and inevitable results of our rejection of God's beneficence,
of our ignoring of His intent. Were we, on the other hand, to follow
his clear, simple rule of right, leaving scrupulously to the individual
all that individual labor produces, and taking for the community the
value that attaches to land by the growth of the community itself, not
merely could evil modes of raising public revenues be dispensed with,
but all men would be placed on an equal level of opportunity with regard
to the bounty of their Creator, on an equal level of opportunity to exert
their labor and to enjoy its fruits. And then, without drastic or restrictive
measures, the forestalling of land would cease. For then the possession
of land would mean only security for the permanence of its use, and there
would be no object for anyone to get land or to keep land except for use,
nor would his possession of better land than others had confer any unjust
advantage on him or unjust deprivation on them, since the equivalent of
the advantage would be taken by the state for the benefit of all.
The Right Reverend Dr. Thomas Nulty,
Bishop of Meath, who sees all this as clearly as we do, in pointing
out to the clergy and laity of his diocese(2)
the design of Divine Providence that the rent of land should be taken for
the community, says:

I think, therefore,
that I may fairly infer, on the strength of authority as well as of
reason, that the people are and always must be the real owners of the
land of their country. This great social fact appears to me to be of incalculable
importance, and it is fortunate, indeed, that on the strictest principles
of justice it is not clouded even by a shadow of uncertainty or doubt.
There is, moreover, a charm and a peculiar beauty in the clearness with
which it reveals the wisdom and the benevolence of the designs of Providence
in the admirable provision He has made for the wants and the necessities
of that state of social existence of which He is author, and in which the
very instincts of nature tell us we are to spend our lives. A vast public
property, a great national fund, has been placed under the dominion and
at the disposal of the nation to supply itself abundantly with resources
necessary to liquidate the expenses of its government, the administration
of its laws and the education of its youth, and to enable it to provide
for the suitable sustentation and support of its criminal and pauper population.
One of the most interesting peculiarities of this property is that its value
is never stationary; it is constantly progressive and increasing in a direct
ratio to the growth of the population, and the very causes that increase
and multiply the demands made on it increase proportionately its ability
to meet them.

There is indeed,
as Bishop Nulty says, a peculiar beauty in the clearness with which
the wisdom and benevolence of Providence are revealed in this great social
fact, the provision made for the common needs of society in what economists
call the law of rent. Of all the evidence that natural religion gives,
it is this that most clearly shows the existence of a beneficent God, and
most conclusively silences the doubts that in our days lead so many to
materialism.
For in this beautiful provision made
by natural law for the social needs of civilization, we see that God
has intended civilization, that all our discoveries and inventions do
not and cannot outrun his forethought, and that steam, electricity, and
labor-saving appliances only make the great moral laws clearer and more
important. In the growth of this great fund, increasing with social advance—a
fund that accrues from the growth of the community and belongs therefore
to the community—we see not only that there is no need for the taxes that
lessen wealth, that engender corruption, that promote inequality and teach
men to deny the gospel, but that to take this fund for the purpose for
which it was evidently intended would, in the highest civilization, secure
to all the equal enjoyment of God's bounty, the abundant opportunity to
satisfy their wants, and would provide amply for every legitimate need of
the state. We see that God in His dealings with men has not been a bungler
or a niggard; that He has not brought too many men into the world; that
He has not neglected abundantly to supply them; that He has not intended
that bitter competition of the masses for a mere animal existence and that
monstrous aggregation of wealth which characterize our civilization; but
that these evils, which lead so many to say there is no God, or yet more impiously
to say that they are of God's ordering, are due to our denial of His moral
law. We see that the law of justice, the law of the Golden Rule, is not a
mere counsel of perfection but indeed the law of social life. We see that
if we were only to observe it, there would be work for all, leisure for all,
abundance for all; and that civilization would tend to give to the poorest
not only necessaries, but all comforts and reasonable luxuries as well. We
see that Christ was not a mere dreamer when He told men that, if they would
seek the Kingdom of God and its right doing, they might no more worry about
material things than do the lilies of the field about their raiment; but
that He was only declaring what political economy, in the light of modern
discovery, shows to be a sober truth.
Your Holiness, even to see this is
deep and lasting joy. For it is to see for one's self that there is
a God who lives and reigns, and that he is a God of justice and love—Our
Father, who art in Heaven. It is to open a rift of sunlight through
the clouds of our darker questionings, and to make the faith that trusts
where it cannot see, a living thing.

II

Your Holiness will
see from the explanation I have given that the reform we propose, like
all true reforms, has both an ethical and an economic side. By ignoring
the ethical side and pushing our proposal merely as a reform of taxation,
we could avoid the objections that arise from confounding ownership with
possession and attributing to private property in land that security of
use and improvement that can be had even better without it. All that we
seek practically is the legal abolition, as fast as possible, of taxes
on the products and processes of labor, and the consequent concentration
of taxation on land-values irrespective of improvements. To put our proposals
in this way would be to urge them merely as a matter of wise public expediency.

There are indeed
many single-tax men who do put our proposals in this way; who, seeing
the beauty of our plan from a fiscal standpoint, do not concern themselves
farther. But to those who think as I do, the ethical is the more important
side. Not only do we not wish to evade the question of private property
in land, but to us it seems that the beneficent and far-reaching revolution
we aim at is too great a thing to be accomplished by "intelligent self-interest",
and can be carried by nothing less than the religious conscience.
Hence we earnestly seek the judgment
of religion. This is the tribunal of which your Holiness, as the head
of the largest body of Christians, is the most august representative.
It therefore behooves us to examine
the reasons you urge in support of private property in land—if they
be sound, to accept them; and if they be not sound, respectfully to
point out to you wherein is their error.
To your proposition that "Our first
and most fundamental principle, when we undertake to alleviate the condition
of the masses, must be the inviolability of private property," we would
joyfully agree if we could only understand you to have in mind the moral
element and to mean rightful private property, as when you speak of marriage
as ordained by God's authority we may understand an implied exclusion
of improper marriages. Unfortunately, however, other expressions show
that you mean private property in general and have expressly in mind private
property in land. This confusion of thought, this non-distribution of
terms, runs through your whole argument, leading you to conclusions so
unwarranted by your premises as to be utterly repugnant to them, as when
from the moral sanction of private property in the things produced by
labor, you infer something entirely different and utterly opposed: a similar
right of property in the land created by God.
Private property is not of one species,
and moral sanction can no more be asserted universally of it than of
marriage. That proper marriage conforms to the law of God does not justify
the polygamic or polyandric or incestuous marriages that are in some
countries permitted by the civil law. And as there may be immoral marriage,
so may there be immoral private property. Private property is that which
may be held in ownership by an individual, or that which may be held in
ownership by an individual with the sanction of the state. The mere lawyer,
the mere servant of the state, may rest here, refusing to distinguish between
what the state holds equally lawful. Your Holiness, however, is not a servant
of the state, but a servant of God, a guardian of morals. You know, as
said by St. Thomas of Aquin, that:

"Human law is law only in virtue of its accordance
with right reason, and it is thus manifest that it flows from the eternal
law. And in so far as it deviates from right reason, it is called an
unjust law. In such case it is not law at all, but rather a species of
violence."

Thus, that any species of property is
permitted by the state does not of itself give it moral sanction. The
state has often made things property that are not justly property, but
involve violence and robbery. For instance, the things of religion,
the dignity and authority of offices of the Church, the power of administering
her sacraments and controlling her temporalities, have often by profligate
princes been given as saleable property to courtiers and concubines.
At this very day in England, an Atheist or a Heathen may buy in open market,
and hold as legal property to be sold, given, or bequeathed as he pleases,
the power of appointing to the cure of souls, and the value of these legal
rights of presentation is said to be no less than £17,000,000.
Or again: Slaves were universally treated
as property by the customs and laws of the classical nations, and were
so acknowledged in Europe long after the acceptance of Christianity.
At the beginning of this century there was no Christian nation that did
not, in her colonies at least, recognize property in slaves, and slave-ships
crossed the seas under Christian flags. In the United States little more
than thirty years ago, to buy a man gave the same legal ownership as to
buy a horse; and in Mohammedan countries, law and custom yet make the slave
the property of his captor or purchaser.
Yet your Holiness, one of the glories
of whose pontificate is the attempt to break up slavery in its last
strongholds, will not contend that the moral sanction that attaches to
property in things produced by labor can, or ever could, apply to property
in slaves.
Your use in so many passages of your
Encyclical of the inclusive term property, or private property, of which
in morals nothing can be either affirmed or denied, makes your meaning,
if we take isolated sentences, in many places ambiguous. But reading it
as a whole, there can be no doubt of your intention that private property
in land shall be understood when you speak merely of private property.
With this interpretation I find that the reasons you urge for private property
in land are eight. Let me consider them in order of presentation. You urge:

1. That what is bought with rightful
property is rightful property. (5.)(3)

Clearly purchase
and sale cannot give, but can only transfer, ownership. Property that
in itself has no moral sanction does not obtain moral sanction by passing
from seller to buyer.

If right reason
does not make the slave the property of the slave-hunter, it does not
make him the property of the slave-buyer. Yet your reasoning as to private
property in land would as well justify property in slaves. To show this
it is only needful to change in your argument the word land to the word
slave. It would then read:

"It is surely undeniable that when
a man engages in remunerative labor, the very reason and motive of his
work is to obtain property and to hold it as his own private possession.
If one man hires out to another his strength or his industry, he does
this for the purpose of receiving in return what is necessary for food
and living; he thereby expressly proposes to acquire a full and real right,
not only to the remuneration, but also to the disposal of that remuneration
as he pleases. Thus, if he lives sparingly, saves money, and invests his
savings for greater security in a slave, the slave in such a case is only
his wages in another form; and consequently a working man's slave thus purchased
should be as completely at his own disposal as the wages he receives for
his labor."

Nor in turning
your argument for private property in land into an argument for private property
in men am I doing a new thing. In my own country, in my own time, this
very argument—that purchase gave ownership—was the common defense of
slavery. It was made by statesmen, by jurists, by clergymen, by bishops;
it was accepted over the whole country by the great mass of the people.
By it was justified the separation of wives from husbands, of children
from parents, the compelling of labor, the appropriation of its fruits,
the buying and selling of Christians by Christians. In language almost
identical with yours it was asked, "Here is a poor man who has worked
hard, lived sparingly, and invested his savings in a few slaves. Would
you rob him of his earnings by liberating those slaves?" Or it was said:
"Here is a poor widow; all her husband has been able to leave her is a few
Negroes, the earnings of his hard toil. Would you rob the widow and the
orphan by freeing these Negroes?" And because of this perversion of reason,
this confounding of unjust property rights with just property rights, this
acceptance of man's law as though it were God's law, there came on our nation
a judgment of fire and blood.

The error of our
people, in thinking that what in itself was not rightful property could
become rightful property by purchase and sale, is the same error into
which your Holiness falls. It is not merely formally the same; it is
essentially the same. Private property in land, no less than private
property in slaves, is a violation of the true rights of property. They
are different forms of the same robbery—twin devices by which the perverted
ingenuity of man has sought to enable the strong and the cunning to escape
God's requirement of labor by forcing it on others.

What difference
does it make whether I merely own the land on which another man must
live or own the man himself? Am I not in the one case as much his master
as in the other? Can I not compel him to work for me? Can I not take
to myself as much of the fruits of his labor—as fully dictate his actions?
Have I not over him the power of life and death? For to deprive a man
of land is as certain to kill him as to deprive him of blood by opening
his veins, or of air by tightening a halter around his neck.

The essence of
slavery is in empowering one man to obtain the labor of another without recompense.
Private property in land does this as fully as chattel-slavery. The
slave-owner must leave to the slave enough of his earnings to enable
him to live. Are there not, in so-called free countries, great bodies
of working-men who get no more? How much more of the fruits of their toil
do the agricultural laborers of Italy and England get than did the slaves
of our Southern States? Did not private property in land permit the landowner
of Europe in ruder times to demand the jus primæ noctis? Does not
the same last outrage exist today in diffused form in the immorality born
of monstrous wealth on the one hand and ghastly poverty on the other?

In what did the
slavery of Russia consist but in giving to to the master land on which
the serf was forced to live? When an Ivan or a Catherine enriched their
favorites with the labor of others they did not give men; they gave
land. And when the appropriation of land has gone so far that no free
land remains to which the landless man may turn, then, without further
violence, the more insidious form of labor-robbery involved in private
property in land takes the place of chattel-slavery, because more economical
and convenient. For under it the slave does not have to be caught or held,
or to be fed when not needed. He comes of himself, begging the privilege
of serving, and when no longer wanted can be discharged. The lash is unnecessary;
hunger is as efficacious. This is why the Norman conquerors of England,
and the English conquerors of Ireland, did not divide up the people, but
divided the land. This is why European slave ships took their cargoes to
the New World, not to Europe.

Slavery is not
yet abolished. Though in all Christian countries its ruder form has now gone,
it still exists in the heart of our civilization in a more insidious
form, and is increasing. There is work to be done for the glory of God
and the liberty of man by other soldiers of the Cross than those warrior
monks whom, with the blessing of your Holiness, Cardinal Lavigerie is
sending into the Sahara. Yet your Encyclical employs in defense of one
form of slavery the same fallacies that the apologists for chattel-slavery
used in defense of the other!

The Arabs are not
wanting in acumen. Your Encyclical reaches far. What shall your warrior
monks say if, when at the muzzle of their rifles they demand of some
Arab slave merchant his miserable caravan, he shall declare that he bought
them with his savings and, producing a copy of your Encyclical, shall
prove by your reasoning that his slaves are consequently "only his wages
in another form", and ask if they who bear your blessing and own your
authority propose to "deprive him of the liberty of disposing of his wages,
and thus of all hope and possibility of increasing his stock and bettering
his condition in life?"

2. That private
property in land proceeds from man's gift of reason. (6–7.)

In the second place
your Holiness argues that man, possessing reason and forethought, may
not only acquire ownership of the fruits of the earth but also of the
earth itself, so that out of its products he may make provision for the
future.

Reason, with its
attendant forethought, is indeed the distinguishing attribute of man,
that which raises him above the brute and shows, as the Scriptures declare,
that he is created in the likeness of God. And this gift of reason does,
as your Holiness points out, involve the need and right of private property
in whatever is produced by the exertion of reason and its attendant
forethought, as well as in what is produced by physical labor. In truth,
these elements of man's production are inseparable and labor involves
the use of reason. It is by his reason that man differs from the animals
in being a producer, and in this sense a maker. Of themselves his physical
powers are slight, forming, as it were, but the connection by which the
mind takes hold of material things so as to utilize to its will the matter
and forces of nature. It is mind, the intelligent reason, that is the prime
mover in labor, the essential agent in production.

The right of private
ownership does therefore indisputably attach to things provided by
man's reason and forethought. But it cannot attach to things provided
by the reason and forethought of God!

To illustrate:
Let us suppose a company travelling through the desert as the Israelites
travelled from Egypt. Such of them as had the forethought to provide themselves
with vessels of water would acquire a just right of property in the water
so carried; and in the thirst of the waterless desert, those who had neglected
to provide themselves, though they might ask water from the provident in
charity, could not demand it in right. For while water itself is of the providence
of God, the presence of this water in such vessels, at such place, results
from the providence of the men who carried it. Thus they have to it an exclusive
right.

But suppose others
use their forethought in pushing ahead and appropriating the springs,
refusing, when their fellows come up, to let them drink of the water
save as they buy it of them. Would such forethought give any right?

Your Holiness,
it is not the forethought of carrying water where it is needed, but the forethought
of seizing springs, that you seek to defend in defending the private
ownership of land!

Let me show this
more fully, since it may be worthwhile to meet those who say that,
if private property in land be not just, then private property in the
products of labor is not just, as the material of these products is taken
from land. It will be seen on consideration that all of man's production
is analogous to such transportation of water, as we have supposed. In
growing grain, or smelting metals, or building houses, or weaving cloth,
or doing any of the things that constitute production, all that man does
is to change in place or form pre-existing matter. As a producer, man
is merely a changer, not a creator; God alone creates. And since the
changes in which man's production consists inhere in matter so long as
they persist, the right of private ownership attaches the accident to the
essence, and gives the right of ownership in that natural material in which
the labor of production is embodied. Thus water, which in its original form
and place is the common gift of God to all men, when drawn from its natural
reservoir and brought into the desert passes rightfully into the ownership
of the individual who, by changing its place, has produced it there.

But such right
of ownership is in reality a mere right of temporary possession; for though
man may take material from the storehouse of Nature and change it in place
or form to suit his desires, yet, from the moment he takes it, it tends back
to that storehouse again. Wood decays, iron rusts, stone disintegrates
and is displaced, while of more perishable products, some will last
for only a few months, others for only a few days, and some disappear
immediately on use. Though, so far as we can see, matter is eternal and
force forever persists; though we can neither annihilate nor create the
tiniest mote that floats in a sunbeam or the faintest impulse that stirs
a leaf, yet in the ceaseless flux of Nature, man's work of moving and
combining constantly passes away. Thus the recognition of the ownership
of what natural material is embodied in the products of man never constitutes
more than temporary possession—never interferes with the reservoir provided
for all. As taking water from one place and carrying it to another place
by no means lessens the store of water—since, whether it is drunk or
spilled or left to evaporate, it must return again to the natural reservoirs—so
is it with all things on which man, in production, can lay the impress
of his labor.

Hence, when you
say that man's reason puts it within his right to have in stable and
permanent possession not only things that perish in the using, but also
those that remain for use in the future, you are right in so far as you
may include such things as buildings, which with repair will last for
generations, with such things as food or firewood, which are destroyed
in the use. But when you infer that man can have private ownership in
those permanent things of Nature that are the reservoirs from which all
must draw, you are clearly wrong. Man may indeed hold in private ownership
the fruits of the earth produced by his labor, since they lose in time
the impress of that labor and pass again into the natural reservoirs from
which they were taken, and thus the ownership of them by one works no injury
to others. But he cannot so own the earth itself, for that is the reservoir
from which must constantly be drawn not only the material with which alone
men can produce, but even their very bodies.

The conclusive
reason why man cannot claim ownership in the earth itself, as he can in the
fruits that he, by labor, brings forth from it, is in the facts stated by
you in the very next paragraph (7), when you truly say:

"Man's needs do not die out, but
recur; satisfied today, they demand new supplies tomorrow. Nature, therefore,
owes to man a storehouse that shall never fail, the daily supply of his
daily wants. And this he finds only in the inexhaustible fertility of
the earth."

By man you mean
all men. Can what Nature owes to all men be made the private property
of some men, from which they may debar all other men?

Let me dwell on
the words of your Holiness, "Nature, therefore, owes to man a storehouse
that shall never fail." By Nature you mean God. Thus your thought, that
in creating us God himself has incurred an obligation to provide us with
a storehouse that shall never fail, is the same as is thus expressed
and carried to its irresistible conclusion by the Bishop of Meath:

"God was
perfectly free in the act by which He created us; but, having created
us, He bound himself by that act to provide us with the means necessary
for our subsistence. The land is the only source of this kind now known
to us. The land, therefore, of every country is the common property of
the people of that country, because its real owner, the Creator who made
it, has transferred it as a voluntary gift to them. "Terram autem dedit
filiis hominum." Now, as every individual in that country is a creature
and child of God, and as all His creatures are equal in His sight, any settlement
of the land of a country that would exclude the humblest man in that country
from his share of the common inheritance would be not only an injustice
and a wrong to that man, but, moreover, would be AN IMPIOUS RESISTANCE TO
THE BENEVOLENT INTENTIONS OF HIS CREATOR."

3. That private
property in land deprives no one of the use of land. (8.)

Your own statement
that land is the inexhaustible storehouse that God owes to man must
have aroused in your Holiness's mind an uneasy questioning of its appropriation
as private property; for, as though to reassure yourself, you proceed
to argue that its ownership by some will not injure others. You say, in
substance, that even though divided among private owners, the earth does
not cease to minister to the needs of all, since those who do not possess
the soil can, by selling their labor, obtain in payment the produce of
the land.

Suppose that to
your Holiness as a judge of morals one should put this case of conscience:

"I am one of several children to
whom our father left a field abundant for our support. As he assigned no
part of it to any one of us in particular, leaving the limits of our separate
possession to be fixed by ourselves, I being the eldest took the whole
field in exclusive ownership. But, in doing so, I have not deprived my
brothers of their support from it, for I have let them work for me on it,
paying them from the produce as much wages as I would have had to pay strangers.
Is there any reason why my conscience should not be clear?"

What would be your
answer? Would you not tell him that he was in mortal sin, and that
his excuse added to his guilt? Would you not call on him to make restitution
and to do penance?

Or suppose that,
as a temporal prince, your Holiness were ruler of a rainless land such
as Egypt, where there were no springs or brooks, their want being supplied
by a bountiful river like the Nile. Supposing that having sent a number
of your subjects to make fruitful this land, bidding them do justly and
prosper, you were told that some of them had set up a claim of ownership
in the river, refusing the others a drop of water except as they bought
it of them, and that thus they had become rich without work, while the others,
though working hard, were so impoverished by paying for water as to be
hardly able to exist.

Would not your
indignation wax hot when this was told?

Suppose that then
the river-owners should send to you and thus excuse their action:

"The river, though divided among
private owners, ceases not thereby to minister to the needs of all, for
there is no one who drinks who does not drink of the water of the river.
Those who do not possess the water of the river contribute their labor
to get it; so that it may be truly said that all water is supplied either
from one's own river, or from some laborious industry which is paid for
either in the water, on in that which is exchanged for the water."

Would the indignation
of your Holiness be abated? Would it not wax fiercer yet for the insult
to your intelligence of this excuse?

I do not need more
formally to show your Holiness that between utterly depriving a man
of God's gifts, and depriving him of God's gifts unless he will buy them,
is merely the difference between the robber who leaves his victim to
die and the robber who puts him to ransom. But I would like to point
out how your statement that "the earth, though divided among private owners,
ceases not thereby to minister to the needs of all" overlooks the largest
facts.

From your palace
of the Vatican the eye may rest on the expanse of the Campagna, where
the pious toil of religious congregations and the efforts of the state
are only now beginning to make it possible for men to live. Once that
expanse was tilled by thriving husbandmen and dotted with smiling hamlets.
What for centuries has condemned it to desertion? History tells us. It
was private property in land; the growth of the great estates of which
Pliny saw that ancient Italy was perishing; the cause that, by bringing
failure to the crop of men, let in the Goths and Vandals, gave Roman Britain
to the worship of Odin and Thor, and, in what were once the rich and populous
provinces of the East, shivered the thinned ranks and palsied arms of the
legions on the scimitars of Mohammedan hordes, and in the sepulcher of
our Lord and in the Church of St. Sophia trampled the Cross to rear the
Crescent!

If you go to Scotland,
you may see great tracts that under the Gaelic tenure, which recognized
the right of each to a foothold in the soil, bred sturdy men, but that
now, under the recognition of private property in land, are given up
to wild animals. If you go to Ireland your Bishops will show you, on lands
where now only beasts graze, the traces of hamlets that, when they were
young priests, were filled with honest, kindly, religious people.(4)

If you will come
to the United States you will find, in a land wide enough and rich
enough to support in comfort the whole population of Europe, the growth
of a sentiment that looks with evil eye on immigration, because the artificial
scarcity that results from private property in land makes it seem as
if there were not room enough and work enough for those already here.

Or go to the Antipodes,
and in Australia as in England you may see that private property in
land is operating to leave the land barren and to crowd the bulk of the
population into great cities. Go wherever you please where the forces
loosed by modern invention are beginning to be felt, and you may see
that private property in land is the curse, denounced by the prophet,
that prompts men to lay field to field till they "alone dwell in the midst
of the earth."

To the mere materialist
this is sin and shame. Shall we to whom this world is God's world—we
who hold that man is called to this life, only as a prelude to a higher
life—shall we defend it?

4. That industry
expended on land gives ownership in the land itself. (9–10).

Your Holiness next
contends that industry expended on land gives a right to ownership
of the land, and that the improvement of land creates benefits indistinguishable
and inseparable from the land itself.

This contention,
if valid, could only justify the ownership of land by those who expend
industry on it. This would not justify private property in land as it
exists. On the contrary, it would justify a gigantic no-rent declaration
that would take land from those who now legally own it, the landlords,
and turn it over to the tenants and laborers. And if it also be that improvements
cannot be distinguished and separated from the land itself, how could
the landlords claim consideration even for improvements they had made?

But your Holiness
cannot mean what your words imply. What you really mean, I take it,
is that the original justification and title of land ownership is in
the expenditure of labor on it. But neither can this justify private
property in land as it exists. For is it not all but universally true that
existing land titles do not come from use, but from force or fraud?

Take Italy! Is
it not true that the greater part of the land of Italy is held by those who,
so far from ever having expended industry on it, have been mere appropriators
of the industry of those who have? Is this not also true of Great Britain
and of other countries? Even in the United States, where the forces
of concentration have not yet had time fully to operate and there has
been some attempt to give land to users, it is probably true today that
the greater part of the land is held by those who neither use it nor propose
to use it themselves, but merely hold it to compel others to pay them
for permission to use it.

And if industry
gives ownership to land, what are the limits of this ownership? If
a man may acquire the ownership of several square miles of land by grazing
sheep on it, does this give to him and his heirs the ownership of the
same land when it is found to contain rich mines, or when by the growth
of population and the progress of society it is needed for farming, for
gardening, for the close occupation of a great city? Is it on the rights
given by the industry of those who first used it for grazing cows or
growing potatoes that you would found the title to the land now covered
by the city of New York and having a value of thousands of millions of
dollars?

But your contention
is not valid. Industry expended on land gives a right of ownership
in the fruits of that industry, but not in the land itself, just as
industry expended on the ocean would give a right of ownership to the
fish taken by it, but not a right of ownership in the ocean. Nor yet
is it true that private ownership of land is necessary to secure the fruits
of labor on land; nor does the improvement of land create benefits indistinguishable
and inseparable from the land itself. That secure possession is necessary
to the use and improvement of land, I have already explained; but that
ownership is not necessary is shown by the fact that in all civilized countries
land owned by one person is cultivated and improved by other persons. Most
of the cultivated land in the British Islands, as in Italy and other countries,
is cultivated not by owners but by tenants. And so the costliest buildings
are erected by those who are not owners of the land, but who have from
the owner a mere right of possession for a time on condition of certain
payments. Nearly the whole of London has been built in this way, and in
New York, Chicago, Denver, San Francisco, Sydney and Melbourne, as well
as in continental cities, the owners of many of the largest edifices will
be found to be different persons from the owners of the ground. So far from
the value of improvements being inseparable from the value of land, it is
in individual transactions constantly separated. For instance, one-half
of the land on which the immense Grand Pacific Hotel in Chicago stands
was recently separately sold, and in Ceylon it is a not infrequent occurrence
for one person to own a fruit tree and another to own the ground in which
it is implanted.

There is indeed
no improvement of land, whether it be clearing, plowing, manuring,
cultivating, the digging of cellars, the opening of wells, or the building
of houses, that so long as its usefulness continues does not have a
value clearly distinguishable from the value of the land. For land having
such improvements will always sell or rent for more than similar land
without them.

If, therefore,
the state levy a tax equal to what the land irrespective of improvement would
bring, it will take the benefits of mere ownership, but will leave
the full benefits of use and improvement, which the prevailing system
does not do. And since the holder, who would still in form continue to
be the owner, could at any time give or sell both possession and improvements,
subject to future assessment by the state on the value of the land alone,
he will be perfectly free to retain or dispose of the full amount of property
that the exertion of his labor or the investment of his capital has attached
to or stored up in the land.

Thus what we propose
would secure, as it is impossible in any other way to secure, what
you properly say is just and right—"that the results of labor should
belong to him who has labored". But private property in land—to allow
the holder, without adequate payment to the state, to take for himself
the benefit of the value that attaches to land with social growth and
improvement—does take the results of labor from him who has labored,
does turn over the fruits of one man's labor to be enjoyed by another.
For labor, as the active factor, is the producer of all wealth. Mere ownership
produces nothing. A man might own a world, but so sure is the decree that
"by the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat bread" that without labor he could
not get a meal or provide himself a garment. Hence when the owners of land,
by virtue of their ownership and without laboring themselves, get the products
of labor in abundance, these things must come from the labor of others,
must be the fruits of others' sweat, taken from those who have a right to
them, and enjoyed by those who have no right to them.

The only utility
of private ownership of land, as distinguished from possession, is
the evil utility of giving to the owner products of labor he does not
earn. For until land will yield to its owner some return beyond that
of the labor and capital he expends on it—that is to say, until by sale
or rental he can, without expenditure of labor, obtain from it products
of labor—ownership amounts to no more than security of possession and
has no value. Its importance and value begin only when, either in the
present or prospectively, it will yield a revenue—that is to say, will
enable the owner as owner to obtain products of labor without exertion
on his part, and thus to enjoy the results of others' labor.

What largely keeps
men from realizing the robbery involved in private property in land
is that in the most striking cases, the robbery is not of individuals
but of the community. For, as I have before explained, it is impossible
for rent in the economic sense—that value which attaches to land by reason
of social growth and improvement—to go to the user. It can go only to the
owner or to the community. Thus those who pay enormous rents for the use
of land in such centers as London or New York are not individually injured.
Individually they get a return for what they pay, and must feel that they
have no better right to the use of such peculiarly advantageous localities
without paying for it than have thousands of others. And so not thinking
or not caring for the interests of the community, they make no objection
to the system.

It recently came
to light in New York that a man having no title whatever had been for
years collecting rents on a piece of land that the growth of the city
had made very valuable. Those who paid these rents had never stopped to
ask whether he had any right to them. They felt that they had no right
to land that so many others would like to have, without paying for it, and
did not think of, or did not care for, the rights of all.

5. That private
property in land has the support of the common opinion of mankind,
and has conduced to peace and tranquillity, and that it is sanctioned
by the Divine Law. (11.)

Even were it true
that the common opinion of mankind has sanctioned private property
in land, this would no more prove its justice than the once universal
practice of the known world would have proved the justice of slavery.

But it is not true.
Examination will show that wherever we can trace them, the first perceptions
of mankind have always recognized the equality of right to land, and
that when individual possession became necessary to secure the right
of ownership in things produced by labor, some method of securing equality,
sufficient in the existing state of social development, was adopted.
Thus, among some peoples, land used for cultivation was periodically divided,
land used for pasturage and wood being held in common. Among others, every
family was permitted to hold what land it needed for a dwelling and for
cultivation, but the moment that such use and cultivation stopped, any
one else could step in and take it on like tenure. Of the same nature
were the land laws of the Mosaic code. The land, first fairly divided
among the people, was made inalienable by the provision of the jubilee,
under which, if sold, it reverted every fiftieth year to the children of
its original possessors.

Private property
in land as we know it, the attaching to land of the same right of ownership
that justly attaches to the products of labor, has never grown up anywhere
save by usurpation or force. Like slavery, it is the result of war.
It comes to us of the modern world from your ancestors, the Romans, whose
civilization it corrupted and whose empire it destroyed.

It made with the
freer spirit of the northern peoples the combination of the feudal
system, in which, though subordination was substituted for equality,
there was still a rough recognition of the principle of common rights
in land. A fief was a trust, and to enjoyment was annexed some obligation.
The sovereign, the representative of the whole people, was the only owner
of land. Of him, immediately or mediately, held tenants, whose possession
involved duties or payments, which, though rudely and imperfectly, embodied
the idea that we would carry out in the single tax, of taking land-values
for public uses. The Crown lands maintained the sovereign and the civil
list; the Church lands defrayed the cost of public worship and instruction,
of the relief of the sick, the destitute, and the wayworn; while the military
tenures provided for public defense and bore the costs of war. A fourth
and very large portion of the land remained in common, the people of the
neighborhood being free to pasture it, cut wood on it, or put it to other
common uses.

In this partial
yet substantial recognition of common rights to land is to be found
the reason why, in a time when the industrial arts were rude, wars frequent,
and the great discoveries and inventions of our time unthought of, the
condition of the laborer was devoid of that grinding poverty which despite
our marvelous advances now exists. Speaking of England, the highest
authority on such subjects, the late Professor Thorold Rogers, declares
that in the thirteenth century there was no class so poor, so helpless,
so pressed and degraded as are millions of Englishmen in our boasted nineteenth
century, and that, save in times of actual famine, there was no laborer
so poor as to fear that his wife and children might come to want even were
he taken from them. Dark and rude in many respects as they were, these
were the times when the cathedrals and churches and religious houses whose
ruins yet excite our admiration were built; the times when England had
no national debt, no poor law, no standing army, no hereditary paupers,
no thousands and thousands of human beings rising in the morning without
knowing where they might lay their heads at night.

With the decay
of the feudal system, the system of private property in land that had destroyed
Rome was extended. As to England, it may briefly be said that the Crown
lands were for the most part given away to favorites; that the Church
lands were parcelled among his courtiers by Henry VIII., and in Scotland
grasped by the nobles; that the military dues were finally remitted in
the seventeenth century, and taxation on consumption substituted; and
that by a process beginning with the Tudors and extending to our own time,
all but a mere fraction of the commons were enclosed by the greater landowners,
while the same private ownership of land was extended over Ireland and
the Scottish Highlands, partly by the sword and partly by bribery of the
chiefs. Even the military dues, had they been commuted, not remitted, would
today have more than sufficed to pay all public expenses without one penny
of other taxation.

Of the New World,
whose institutions but continue those of Europe, it is only necessary
to say that to the parcelling out of land in great tracts is due the
backwardness and turbulence of Spanish America; that to the large plantations
of the southern states of the Union was due the persistence of slavery
there, and that the more northern settlements showed the earlier English
feeling, land being fairly well divided, and the attempts to establish
manorial estates coming to little or nothing. In this lies the secret
of the more vigorous growth of the northern states. But the idea that
land was to be treated as private property had been thoroughly established
in English thought before the colonial period ended, and it has been so
treated by the United States and by the several states. And though land
was at first sold cheaply and then given to actual settlers, it was also
sold in large quantities to speculators, given away in great tracts for
railroads and other purposes, until now the public domain of the United
States, which a generation ago seemed illimitable, has practically gone.
And this, as the experience of other countries shows, is the natural result
in a growing community of making land private property. When the possession
of land means the gain of unearned wealth, the strong and unscrupulous
will secure it. But when, as we propose, economic rent, the "unearned
increment of wealth", is taken by the state for the use of the community,
then land will pass into the hands of users and remain there, since, no
matter how great its value, its possession will be profitable only to users.

As to private property
in land having conduced to the peace and tranquillity of human life,
it is not necessary more than to allude to the notorious fact that the
struggle for land has been the prolific source of wars and of lawsuits,
while it is the poverty engendered by private property in land that makes
the prison and the workhouse the unfailing attributes of what we call
Christian civilization.

Your Holiness intimates
that the Divine Law gives its sanction to the private ownership of
land, quoting from Deuteronomy, "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's
wife; nor his house, nor his field, nor his man-servant, nor his maid-servant,
nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything which is his."

If, as your Holiness
conveys, this inclusion of the words "nor his field" is to be taken
as sanctioning private property in land as it exists today, then, but
with far greater force, must the words "nor his man-servant, nor his maid-servant"
be taken to sanction chattel-slavery, for it is evident from other provisions
of the same code that these terms refer both to bondsmen for a term of
years and to perpetual slaves. But the word "field" involves the idea
of use and improvement, to which the right of possession and ownership
attaches without recognition of property in the land itself. And that this
reference to the field is not a sanction of private property in land as
it exists today is proved by the fact that the Mosaic code expressly denied
such unqualified ownership in land, and with the declaration "The land
also shall not be sold forever: because it is mine, and you are strangers
and sojourners with me," provided for its reversion every fiftieth year—thus,
in a way adapted to the primitive industrial conditions of the people and
time, preventing men from being deprived of a foothold in the soil.

Nowhere, in fact,
throughout the Scriptures can the slightest justification be found
for the attaching to land of the same right of property that justly
attaches to the things produced by labor. Everywhere is it treated as
the free bounty of God, as "the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee".

6. That fathers
should provide for their children, and that private property in land
is necessary to enable them to do so. (14–17.)

With all that your
Holiness has to say of the sacredness of the family relation we are
in full accord. But how the obligation of the father to the child can
justify private property in land we cannot see. You reason that private
property in land is necessary to the discharge of the duty of the father,
and is therefore requisite and just, because—

It is a most sacred law of Nature
that a father must provide food and all necessaries for those whom he
has begotten; and similarly Nature dictates that a man's children, who
carry on, as it were, and continue his own personality, should be provided
by him with all that is needful to enable them honorably to keep themselves
from want and misery in the uncertainties of this mortal life. Now in no
other way can a father effect this except by the ownership of profitable
property which he can transmit to his children by inheritance. (14.)

Thanks to Him who
has bound the generations of men together by a provision that brings
the tenderest love to greet our entrance into the world and soothes our
exit with filial piety, it is both the duty and the joy of the father
to care for the child till its powers mature, and afterwards in the natural
order it becomes the duty and privilege of the child to be the stay of
the parent. This is the natural reason for that relation of marriage,
the groundwork of the sweetest, tenderest, and purest of human joys, which
the Catholic Church has guarded with such unremitting vigilance.

We do for a few
years need the providence of our fathers after the flesh. But how small,
how transient, how narrow is this need as compared with our constant
need for the providence of Him in whom we live, move, and have our being—Our
Father who art in Heaven! It is to Him, "the giver of every good and
perfect gift", and not to our fathers after the flesh, that Christ taught
us to pray: "Give us this day our daily bread." And how true it is that
through Him the generations of men exist. Let the mean temperature of
the earth rise or fall a few degrees, an amount as nothing compared with
differences produced in our laboratories, and mankind would disappear
as ice disappears under a tropical sun, would fall as the leaves fall
at the touch of frost. Or let for two or three seasons the earth refuse
her increase, and how many of our millions would remain alive?

The duty of fathers
to transmit to their children profitable property that will enable
them to keep themselves from want and misery in the uncertainties of
this mortal life! What is not possible cannot be a duty. And how is it
possible for fathers to do that? Your Holiness has not considered how
mankind really lives from hand to mouth, getting each day its daily bread—how
little one generation does or can leave another. It is doubtful if the
wealth of the civilized world all told amounts to anything like as much
as one year's labor, while it is certain that if labor were to stop and
men had to rely on existing accumulation, it would be only a few days ere
in the richest countries pestilence and famine would stalk.

The profitable
property your Holiness refers to is private property in land. Now profitable
land, as all economists will agree, is land superior to the land that the
ordinary man can get. It is land that will yield an income to the owner as
owner, and therefore that will permit the owner to appropriate the products
of labor without doing labor, its profitableness to the individual involving
the robbery of other individuals. It is therefore possible only for some
fathers to leave their children profitable land. What therefore your Holiness
practically declares is that it is the duty of all fathers to struggle to
leave their children what only the few peculiarly strong, lucky, or unscrupulous
can leave, and that a something that involves the robbery of others—their
deprivation of the material gifts of God.

This anti-Christian
doctrine has been long in practice throughout the Christian world.
What are its results?

Are they not the
very evils set forth in your Encyclical? Are they not, so far from
enabling men to keep themselves from want and misery in the uncertainties
of this mortal life, to condemn the great masses of men to want and misery
that the natural conditions of our mortal life do not entail—to want and
misery deeper and more widespread than exist among heathen savages? Under
the régime of private property in land and in the richest countries,
not five per cent of fathers are able at their death to leave anything
substantial to their children, and probably a large majority do not leave
enough to bury them! Some few children are left by their fathers richer
than it is good for them to be, but the vast majority not only are left
nothing by their fathers, but by the system that makes land private property
are deprived of the bounty of their Heavenly Father; are compelled to
sue others for permission to live and to work, and to toil all their lives
for a pittance that often does not enable them to escape starvation and
pauperism.

What your Holiness
is actually, though of course inadvertently, urging is that earthly
fathers should assume the functions of the Heavenly Father. It is not
the business of one generation to provide the succeeding generation
with "all that is needful to enable them honorably to keep themselves
from want and misery". That is God's business. We no more create our
children than we create our fathers. It is God who is the Creator of each
succeeding generation, as fully as of the one that preceded it. And, to
recall your own words (7), "Nature [God], therefore, owes to man a storehouse
that shall never fail, the daily supply of his daily wants. And this he
finds only in the inexhaustible fertility of the earth." What you are now
assuming is that it is the duty of men to provide for the wants of their
children by appropriating this storehouse and depriving other men's children
of the unfailing supply that God has provided for all.

The duty of the
father to the child—the duty possible to all fathers! Is it not so
to conduct himself, so to nurture and teach it, that it shall come to
manhood with a sound body, well developed mind, habits of virtue, piety,
and industry, and in a state of society that shall give it and all others
free access to the bounty of God, the providence of the All-Father?

In doing this the
father would be doing more to secure his children from want and misery
than is possible now to the richest of fathers—as much more as the providence
of God surpasses that of man. For the justice of God laughs at the efforts
of men to circumvent it, and the subtle law that binds humanity together
poisons the rich in the sufferings of the poor. Even the few who are
able in the general struggle to leave their children wealth that they
fondly think will keep them from want and misery in the uncertainties
of this mortal life—do they succeed? Does experience show that it is
a benefit to a child to place him above his fellows and enable him to
think God's law of labor is not for him? Is not such wealth oftener a
curse than a blessing, and does not its expectation often destroy filial
love and bring dissensions and heart-burnings into families? And how
far and how long are even the richest and strongest able to exempt their
children from the common lot? Nothing is more certain than that the
blood of the masters of the world flows today in lazzaroni, and that
the descendants of kings and princes tenant slums and workhouses.

But in the state
of society we strive for, where the monopoly and waste of God's bounty
would be done away with and the fruits of labor would go to the laborer,
it would be within the ability of all to make more than a comfortable
living with reasonable labor. And for those who might be crippled or incapacitated
or deprived of their natural protectors and breadwinners, the most ample
provision could be made out of that great and increasing fund with which
God in His law of rent has provided society—not as a matter of niggardly
and degrading alms, but as a matter of right, as the assurance which in
a Christian state society owes to all its members.

Thus it is that
the duty of the father, the obligation to the child, instead of giving
any support to private property in land, utterly condemns it, urging us
by the most powerful considerations to abolish it in the simple and efficacious
way of the single tax.

This duty of the
father, this obligation to children, is not confined to those who have
actually children of their own, but rests on all of us who have come
to the powers and responsibilities of manhood.

For did not Christ
set a little child in the midst of the disciples, saying to them that
the angels of such little ones always behold the face of his Father;
saying to them that it were better for a man to hang a millstone about
his neck and plunge into the uttermost depths of the sea than to injure
such a little one?

And what today
is the result of private property in land in the richest of so-called Christian
countries? Is it not that young people fear to marry; that married
people fear to have children; that children are driven out of life
from sheer want of proper nourishment and care, or compelled to toil
when they ought to be at school or at play; that great numbers of those
who attain maturity enter it with under-nourished bodies, overstrained
nerves, undeveloped minds—under conditions that foredoom them not merely
to suffering, but to crime; that fit them in advance for the prison
and the brothel?

If your Holiness
will consider these things we are confident that instead of defending
private property in land you will condemn it with anathema!

7. That the private
ownership of land stimulates industry, increases wealth, and attaches men
to the soil and to their country. (51.)

The idea, as expressed
by Arthur Young, that "the magic of property turns barren sands to
gold" springs from the confusion of ownership with possession, of which
I have before spoken, that attributes to private property in land what
is due to security of the products of labor. It is needless for me again
to point out that the change we propose—the taxation for public uses of
land-values, or economic rent, and the abolition of other taxes—would
give to the user of land far greater security for the fruits of his labor
than the present system, and far greater permanence of possession. Nor
is it necessary further to show how it would give homes to those who are
now homeless and bind men to their country. For under it every one who
wanted a piece of land for a home or for productive use could get it without
purchase-price and hold it even without tax, since the tax we propose would
not fall on all land, nor even on all land in use, but only on land better
than the poorest land in use, and is in reality not a tax at all, but merely
a return to the state for the use of a valuable privilege. And even those
who from circumstances or occupation did not wish to make permanent use
of land would still have an equal interest with all others in the land
of their country and in the general prosperity.

But I should like
your Holiness to consider how utterly unnatural is the condition of
the masses in the richest and most progressive of Christian countries;
how large bodies of them live in habitations in which a rich man would
not ask his dog to dwell; how the great majority have no homes from which
they are not liable on the slightest misfortune to be evicted; how numbers
have no homes at all, but must seek what shelter chance or charity offers.
I should like to ask your Holiness to consider how the great majority of
men in such countries have no interest whatever in what they are taught
to call their native land, for which they are told that on occasions it
is their duty to fight or to die. What right, for instance, have the majority
of your countrymen in the land of their birth? Can they live in Italy
outside of a prison or a poorhouse except as they buy the privilege from
some of the exclusive owners of Italy? Cannot an Englishman, an American,
an Arab, or a Japanese do as much? May not what was said centuries ago
by Tiberius Gracchus be said today: "Men of Rome! you are called the
lords of the world, yet have no right to a square foot of its soil! The
wild beasts have their dens, but the soldiers of Italy have only water
and air!"

What is true of
Italy is true of the civilized world—is becoming increasingly true.
It is the inevitable effect, as civilization progresses, of private property
in land.

8. That the right
to possess private property in land is from Nature, not from man; that the
state has no right to abolish it, and that to take the value of land-ownership
in taxation would be unjust and cruel to the private owner. (51.)

This, like much
else that your Holiness says, is masked in the use of the indefinite
terms private property and private owner—a want of precision in the
use of words that has doubtless aided in the confusion of your own thought.
But the context leaves no doubt that by private property you mean private
property in land, and by private owner the private owner of land.

The contention
thus made that private property in land is from Nature, not from man, has
no other basis than the confounding of ownership with possession and the
ascription to property in land of what belongs to its contradictory, property
in the proceeds of labor. You do not attempt to show for it any other basis,
nor has any one else ever attempted to do so. That private property in the
products of labor is from Nature is clear, for Nature gives such things to
labor and to labor alone. Of every article of this kind, we know that it
came into being as Nature's response to the exertion of an individual man
or of individual men—given by Nature directly and exclusively to him or to
them. Thus there inheres in such things a right of private property, which
originates from and goes back to the source of ownership, the maker of the
thing. This right is anterior to the state and superior to its enactments
so that, as we hold, it is a violation of natural right and an injustice
to the private owner for the state to tax the processes and products of labor.
They do not belong to Caesar. They are things that God, of whom Nature is
but an expression, gives to those who apply for them in the way He has appointed—by
labor.

But who will dare
trace the individual ownership of land to any grant from the Maker
of land? What does Nature give to such ownership? How does she in any
way recognize it? Will any one show from difference of form or feature,
of stature or complexion, from dissection of their bodies or analysis
of their powers and needs, that one man was intended by Nature to own land
and another to live on it as his tenant? That which derives its existence
from man and passes away like him, which is indeed but the evanescent expression
of his labor, man may hold and transfer as the exclusive property of the
individual; but how can such individual ownership attach to land, which
existed before man was and which continues to exist while the generations
of men come and go—the unfailing storehouse that the Creator gives to man
for "the daily supply of his daily wants"?

Clearly the private
ownership of land is from the state, not from Nature. Thus, not merely
can no objection be made on the score of morals when it is proposed
that the state shall abolish it altogether, but insomuch as it is a violation
of natural right, its existence involving a gross injustice on the part
of the state, an impious violation of the benevolent intention of the
Creator, it is a moral duty that the state so abolish it.

So far from there
being anything unjust in taking the full value of land-ownership for
the use of the community, the real injustice is in leaving it in private
hands—an injustice that amounts to robbery and murder.

And when your Holiness
shall see this I have no fear that you will listen for one moment to
the impudent plea that before the community can take what God intended
it to take, before men who have been disinherited of their natural rights
can be restored to them, the present owners of land shall first be compensated.

For not only will
you see that the single tax will directly and largely benefit small
landowners, whose interests as laborers and capitalists are much greater
than their interests as landowners, and that though the great landowners—or
rather the propertied class in general, among whom the profits of land-ownership
are really divided through mortgages, rent charges, etc.—would relatively
lose, they too would be absolute gainers in the increased prosperity
and improved morals. But more quickly, more strongly, more peremptorily
than from any calculation of gains or losses would your duty as a man,
your faith as a Christian, forbid you to listen for one moment to any such
paltering with right and wrong.

Where the state
takes some land for public uses, it is only just that those whose land
is taken should be compensated; otherwise some landowners would be treated
more harshly than others. But where, by a measure affecting all alike,
rent is appropriated for the benefit of all, there can be no claim to
compensation. Compensation in such case would be a continuance of the
same injustice in another form—the giving to landowners in the shape
of interest of what they before got as rent. Your Holiness knows that
justice and injustice are not thus to be juggled with, and when you fully
realize that land is really the storehouse that God owes to all His children,
you will no more listen to any demand for compensation for restoring it
to them than Moses would have listened to a demand that Pharaoh should be
compensated before letting the children of Israel go.

Compensated for
what? For giving up what has been unjustly taken? The demand of landowners
for compensation is not that. We do not seek to spoil the Egyptians.
We do not ask that what has been unjustly taken from laborers shall be
restored. We are willing that bygones should be bygones and to leave
dead wrongs to bury their dead. We propose to let those who by the past
appropriation of land-values have taken the fruits of labor to retain
what they have thus got. We merely propose that for the future such robbery
of labor shall cease—that for the future, not for the past, land-holders
shall pay to the community the rent that to the community is justly due.

III

I have said enough
to show your Holiness the injustice into which you fall in classing
us, who in seeking virtually to abolish private property in land seek
more fully to secure the true rights of property, with those whom you
speak of as socialists, who wish to make all property common. But you
also do injustice to the socialists.

There are many,
it is true, who feeling bitterly the monstrous wrongs of the present
distribution of wealth, are animated only by a blind hatred of the rich
and a fierce desire to destroy existing social adjustments. This class
is indeed only less dangerous than those who proclaim that no social improvement
is needed or is possible. But it is not fair to confound with them those
who, however mistakenly, propose definite schemes of remedy.

The socialists,
as I understand them, and as the term has come to apply to anything like
a definite theory and not to be vaguely and improperly used to include
all who desire social improvement, do not, as you imply, seek the abolition
of all private property. Those who do this are properly called communists.
What the socialists seek is the assumption by the state of capital (in
which they vaguely and erroneously include land) or, more properly speaking,
of large capitals, and state management and direction of at least the larger
operations of industry. In this way they hope to abolish interest, which
they regard as a wrong and an evil; to do away with the gains of exchangers,
speculators, contractors, and middlemen, which they regard as waste; to
do away with the wage system and secure general cooperation; and to prevent
competition, which they deem the fundamental cause of the impoverishment
of labor. The more moderate of them, without going so far, go in the same
direction and seek some remedy or palliation of the worst forms of poverty
by Government regulation. The essential character of Socialism is that it
looks to the extension of the functions of the state for the remedy of
social evils: that it would substitute regulation and direction for competition,
and intelligent control by organized society for the free play of individual
desire and effort.

Though not usually
classed as states, both the trades-unionists and the protectionists have
the same essential character. The trades-unionists seek the increase of
wages, the reduction of working hours, and the general improvement in
the condition of wage-workers, by organizing them into guilds or associations
which shall fix the rates at which they will sell their labor, shall deal
as one body with employers in case of dispute, shall use on occasion their
necessary weapon, the strike, and shall accumulate funds for such purposes
and for the purpose of assisting members when on a strike, or (sometimes)
when out of employment. The protectionists seek by governmental prohibitions
or taxes on imports to regulate the industry and control the exchanges
of each country, so as, they imagine, to diversify home industries and
prevent the competition of people of other countries.

At the opposite
extreme are the anarchists, a term which, though frequently applied to
mere violent destructionists, refers also to those who, seeing the many
evils of too much government, regard government in itself as evil and
believe that in the absence of coercive power, the mutual interests of
men would secure voluntarily what cooperation is needed.

Differing from
all these are those for whom I would speak. Believing that the rights
of true property are sacred, we would regard forcible communism as robbery
that would bring destruction. But we would not be disposed to deny that
voluntary communism might be the highest possible state of which men can
conceive. Nor do we say that it cannot be possible for mankind to attain
it, since among the early Christians and among the religious orders of the
Catholic Church we have examples of communistic societies on a small scale.
St. Peter and St. Paul, St. Thomas of Aquin and Fra Angelico, the illustrious
orders of the Carmelites and Franciscans, the Jesuits, whose heroism carried
the cross among the most savage tribes of American forests, the societies
that wherever your communion is known have deemed no work of mercy too dangerous
or too repellent, were or are communists. Knowing these things, we cannot
take it on ourselves to say that a social condition may not be possible
in which an all-embracing love shall have taken the place of all other motives.
But we see that communism is only possible where there exists a general
and intense religious faith, and we see that such a state can be reached
only through a state of justice. For before a man can be a saint he must
first be an honest man.

With both anarchists
and states we, who for want of a better term have come to call ourselves
single-tax men, fundamentally differ. We regard them as erring in opposite
directions, the one in ignoring the social nature of man, the other in
ignoring his individual nature. While we see that man is primarily an individual,
and that nothing but evil has come or can come from the interference by
the state with things that belong to individual action, we also see that
he is a social being, or, as Aristotle called him, a political animal, and
that the state is requisite to social advance, having an indispensable place
in the natural order. Looking on the bodily organism as the analogue of
the social organism, and on the proper functions of the state as akin to
those which in the human organism are discharged by the conscious intelligence,
while the play of individual impulse and interest performs functions akin
to those discharged in the bodily organism by the unconscious instincts
and involuntary motions, the Anarchists seem to us like men who would try
to get along without heads, and the states like men who would try to rule
the wonderfully complex and delicate internal relations of their frames by
conscious will.

The philosophical
anarchists of whom I speak are few in number and of little practical
importance. It is with socialism in its various phases that we have to
do battle.

With the socialists
we have some points of agreement, for we recognize fully the social nature
of man and believe that all monopolies should be held and governed by
the state. In these, and in directions where the general health, knowledge,
comfort, and convenience might be improved, we too would extend the functions
of the state.

But it seems to
us the vice of socialism in all its degrees is its want of radicalism,
of going to the root. It takes its theories from those who have sought
to justify the impoverishment of the masses, and its advocates generally
teach the preposterous and degrading doctrine that slavery was the first
condition of labor. It assumes that the tendency of wages to a minimum is
the natural law, and seeks to abolish wages; it assumes that the natural
result of competition is to grind down workers, and seeks to abolish competition
by restrictions, prohibitions, and extensions of governing power. Thus mistaking
effects for causes and childishly blaming the stone for hitting it, it wastes
strength in striving for remedies that when not worse are futile. Associated
though it is in many places with democratic aspiration, yet its essence
is the same delusion to which the children of Israel yielded when, against
the protest of their prophet, they insisted on a king—the delusion that
has everywhere corrupted democracies and enthroned tyrants: that power
over the people can be used for the benefit of the people, that there
may be devised machinery that through human agencies will secure for
the management of individual affairs more wisdom and more virtue than
the people themselves possess.

This superficiality and this tendency
may be seen in all the phases of socialism.

Take, for instance,
protectionism. What support it has—beyond the mere selfish desire of
sellers to compel buyers to pay them more than their goods are worth—springs
from such superficial ideas as that production, not consumption, is the
end of effort, that money is more valuable than money's worth and to sell
more profitable than to buy, and above all from a desire to limit competition,
springing from an unanalyzing recognition of the phenomena that necessarily
follow when men, who have the need to labor, are deprived by monopoly of
access to the natural and indispensable element of all labor. Its methods
involve the idea that governments can more wisely direct the expenditure
of labor and the investment of capital than can laborers and capitalists,
and that the men who control governments will use this power for the general
good and not in their own interests. They tend to multiply officials, restrict
liberty, invent crimes. They promote perjury, fraud, and corruption. And
they would, were the theory carried to its logical conclusion, destroy
civilization and reduce mankind to savagery.

Take trades-unionism.
While within narrow lines trades-unionism promotes the idea of the mutuality
of interests and often helps to raise courage and further political education,
and while it has enabled limited bodies of working-men to improve somewhat
their condition and gain, as it were, breathing space, yet it takes
no note of the general causes that determine the conditions of labor,
and strives for the elevation of only a small part of the great body by
means that cannot help the rest. Aiming at the restriction of competition—the
limitation of the right to labor—its methods are like those of an army,
which even in a righteous cause are subversive of liberty and liable to
abuse, while its weapon, the strike, is destructive in its nature, both
to combatants and non-combatants, being a form of passive war. To apply the
principle of trades-unions to all industry, as some dream of doing, would
be to enthral men in a caste system.

Or take even such
moderate measures as the limitation of working hours and of the labor
of women and children. They are superficial in looking no further than
to the eagerness of men and women and little children to work unduly, and
in proposing forcibly to restrain overwork while utterly ignoring its cause,
the sting of poverty that forces human beings to it. And the methods by
which these restraints must be enforced multiply officials, interfere
with personal liberty, tend to corruption, and are liable to abuse.

As for thorough-going
socialism, which is the more to be honored as having the courage of its
convictions, it would carry these vices to full expression. Jumping to
conclusions without effort to discover causes, it fails to see that oppression
does not come from the nature of capital, but from the wrong that robs labor
of capital by divorcing it from land, and that creates a fictitious capital
that is really capitalized monopoly. It fails to see that it would be impossible
for capital to oppress labor were labor free to the natural material of
production; that the wage system in itself springs from mutual convenience,
being a form of cooperation in which one of the parties prefers a certain
to a contingent result; and that what it calls the "iron law of wages"
is not the natural law of wages, but only the law of wages in that unnatural
condition in which men are made helpless by being deprived of the materials
for life and work. It fails to see that what it mistakes for the evils
of competition are really the evils of restricted competition—are due to
a one-sided competition to which men are forced when deprived of land.
While its methods—the organization of men into industrial armies, the
direction and control of all production and exchange by governmental or
semi-governmental bureaus—would, if carried to full expression, mean Egyptian
despotism.

We differ from
the states in our diagnosis of the evil, and we differ from them as to
remedies. We have no fear of capital, regarding it as the natural handmaiden
of labor; we look on interest in itself as natural and just; we would
set no limit to accumulation, nor impose on the rich any burden that is
not equally placed on the poor; we see no evil in competition, but deem
unrestricted competition to be as necessary to the health of the industrial
and social organism as the free circulation of the blood is to the health
of the bodily organism—to be the agency whereby the fullest cooperation
is to be secured. We would simply take for the community what belongs to
the community, the value that attaches to land by the growth of the community;
leave sacredly to the individual all that belongs to the individual; and,
treating necessary monopolies as functions of the state, abolish all restrictions
and prohibitions save those required for public health, safety, morals,
and convenience.

But the fundamental
difference—the difference I ask your Holiness specially to note—is in
this: socialism in all its phases looks on the evils of our civilization
as springing from the inadequacy or inharmony of natural relations, which
must be artificially organized or improved. In its idea there devolves
on the state the necessity of intelligently organizing the industrial
relations of men—the construction, as it were, of a great machine whose
complicated parts shall properly work together under the direction of
human intelligence. This is the reason why socialism tends towards atheism.
Failing to see the order and symmetry of natural law, it fails to recognize
God.

On the other hand,
we who call ourselves single-tax men (a name which expresses merely our
practical propositions) see in the social and industrial relations of
men not a machine which requires construction, but an organism which needs
only to be suffered to grow. We see in the natural, social, and industrial
laws such harmony as we see in the adjustments of the human body, and that
as far transcends the power of man's intelligence to order and direct as
it is beyond man's intelligence to order and direct the vital movements of
his frame. We see in these social and industrial laws so close a relation
to the moral law as must spring from the same authorship, and that proves
the moral law to be the sure guide of man where his intelligence would wander
and go astray. Thus, to us, all that is needed to remedy the evils of our
time is to do justice and give freedom. This is the reason why our beliefs
tend towards—nay, are indeed—the only beliefs consistent with a firm and
reverent faith in God, and with the recognition of His law as the supreme
law which men must follow if they would secure prosperity and avoid destruction.
This is the reason why, to us, political economy only serves to show the
depths of wisdom in the simple truths, which common people heard gladly from
the lips of Him of whom it was said with wonder, "Is not this the Carpenter
of Nazareth?"

And it is because
that in what we propose—the securing to all men of equal natural opportunities
for the exercise of their powers and the removal of all legal restriction
on the legitimate exercise of those powers—we see the conformation of
human law to the moral law, that we hold with confidence not merely that
this is the sufficient remedy for all the evils you so strikingly portray,
but that it is the only possible remedy.

Nor is there any
other. The organization of man is such, his relations to the world in
which he is placed are such—that is to say, the immutable laws of God
are such—that it is beyond the power of human ingenuity to devise any way
by which the evils born of the injustice that robs men of their birthright
can be removed otherwise than by doing justice, by opening to all the bounty
that God has provided for all.

Since man can live
only on land and from land, since land is the reservoir of matter and force
from which man's body itself is taken, and on which he must draw for all
that he can produce, does it not irresistibly follow that to give the land
in ownership to some men and to deny to others all right to it is to divide
mankind into the rich and the poor, the privileged and the helpless? Does
it not follow that those who have no rights to the use of land can live only
by selling their power to labor to those who own the land? Does it not follow
that what the states call "the iron law of wages", what the Political Economists
term "the tendency of wages to a minimum", must take from the landless masses—the
mere laborers, who of themselves have no power to use their labor—all the
benefits of any possible advance or improvement that does not alter this
unjust division of land? For having no power to employ themselves they must,
either as labor-sellers or as land-renters, compete with one another for
permission to labor. This competition with one another of men shut out from
God's inexhaustible storehouse has no limit but starvation, and must ultimately
force wages to their lowest point, the point at which life can just be maintained
and reproduction carried on.

This is not to
say that all wages must fall to this point, but that the wages of that
necessarily largest stratum of laborers, who have only ordinary knowledge,
skill, and aptitude, must so fall. The wages of special classes, who are
fenced off from the pressure of competition by peculiar knowledge, skill,
or other causes, may remain above that ordinary level. Thus, where the
ability to read and write is rare, its possession enables a man to obtain
higher wages than the ordinary laborer. But as the diffusion of education
makes the ability to read and write general, this advantage is lost. So
when a vocation requires special training or skill or is made difficult
of access by artificial restrictions, the checking of competition tends
to keep wages in it at a higher level. But as the progress of invention
dispenses with peculiar skill, or artificial restrictions are broken down,
these higher wages sink to the ordinary level. And so it is only so long
as they are special that such qualities as industry, prudence, and thrift
can enable the ordinary laborer to maintain a condition above that which
gives a mere living. Where they become general, the law of competition must
reduce the earnings or savings of such qualities to the general level—which,
land being monopolized and labor helpless, can be only that at which the
next lowest point is the cessation of life.

Or, to state the
same thing in another way: Land being necessary to life and labor, its
owners will be able, in return for permission to use it, to obtain from
mere laborers all that labor can produce save enough to enable such of
them to maintain life as are wanted by the landowners and their dependents.

Thus, where private
property in land has divided society into a land-owning class and a landless
class, there is no possible invention or improvement, whether it be
industrial, social, or moral, which, so long as it does not affect the
ownership of land, can prevent poverty or relieve the general conditions
of mere laborers. For whether the effect of any invention or improvement
be to increase what labor can produce, or to decrease what is required
to support the laborer, it can, so soon as it becomes general, result only
in increasing the income of the owners of land, without at all benefiting
the mere laborers. In no event can those possessed of the mere ordinary
power to labor, a power utterly useless without the means necessary to
labor, keep more of their earnings than enough to enable them to live.

How true this is
we may see in the facts of today. In our own time invention and discovery
have enormously increased the productive power of labor, and at the same
time greatly reduced the cost of many things necessary to the support
of the laborer. Have these improvements anywhere raised the earnings of
the mere laborer? Have not their benefits mainly gone to the owners of land—enormously
increased land values?

I say mainly, for
some part of the benefit has gone to the cost of monstrous standing armies
and warlike preparations, to the payment of interest on great public
debts, and, largely disguised as interest on fictitious capital, to the
owners of monopolies other than that of land. But improvements that would
do away with these wastes would not benefit labor; they would simply increase
the profits of landowners. Were standing armies and all their incidents
abolished, were all monopolies other than that of land done away with,
were governments to become models of economy, were the profits of speculators,
of middlemen, of all sorts of exchangers saved, were every one to become
so strictly honest that no policemen, no courts, no prisons, no precautions
against dishonesty would be needed, the result would not differ from that
which has followed the increase of productive power.

Nay, would not
these very blessings bring starvation to many of those who now manage
to live? Is it not true that if there were proposed today, what all Christian
men ought to pray for, the complete disbandment of all the armies of Europe,
the greatest fears would be aroused for the consequences of throwing on
the labor-market so many unemployed laborers?

The explanation
of this and of similar paradoxes that in our time perplex on every side
may be easily seen. The effect of all inventions and improvements that
increase productive power, that save waste and economize effort, is to
lessen the labor required for a given result and thus to save labor, so
that we speak of them as labor-saving inventions or improvements. Now,
in a natural state of society, where the rights of all to the use of the
earth are acknowledged, labor-saving improvements might go to the very utmost
that can be imagined without lessening the demand for men, since in such
natural conditions the demand for men lies in their own enjoyment of life
and the strong instincts that the Creator has implanted in the human breast.
But in that unnatural state of society where the masses of men are disinherited
of all but the power to labor when opportunity to labor is given them by
others, there the demand for them becomes simply the demand for their services
by those who hold this opportunity, and man himself becomes a commodity.
Hence, although the natural effect of labor-saving improvement is to increase
wages, yet in the unnatural condition which private ownership of the land
begets, the effect—even of such moral improvements as the disbandment of
armies, and the saving of the labor that vice entails—is, by lessening the
commercial demand, to lower wages and reduce mere laborers to starvation or
pauperism. If labor-saving inventions and improvements could be carried to
the very abolition of the necessity for labor, what would be the result? Would
it not be that landowners could then get all the wealth that the land was
capable of producing, and would have no need at all for laborers, who must
then either starve or live as pensioners on the bounty of the landowners?

Thus, so long as
private property in land continues—so long as some men are treated as owners
of the earth and other men can live on it only by their sufferance—human wisdom
can devise no means by which the evils of our present condition may be avoided.

Nor yet could the wisdom of God!

By the light of
that right reason of which St. Thomas speaks, we may see that even He,
the Almighty, so long as His laws remain what they are, could do nothing
to prevent poverty and starvation while property in land continues.

How could He? Should
He infuse new vigor into the sunlight, new virtue into the air, new fertility
into the soil, would not all this new bounty go to the owners of the land,
and work not benefit, but rather injury, to mere laborers? Should He open
the minds of men to the possibilities of new substances, new adjustments,
new powers, could this do any more to relieve poverty than steam, electricity,
and all the numberless discoveries and inventions of our time have done?
Or if He were to send down from the heavens above, or cause to gush up
from the subterranean depths, food, clothing, all the things that satisfy
man's material desires, to whom under our laws would all these belong?
So far from benefiting man, would not this increase and extension of His
bounty prove but a curse, enabling the privileged class more riotously to
roll in wealth, and bringing the disinherited class to more widespread starvation
or pauperism?

IV

Believing that
the social question is at bottom a religious question, we deem it of happy
augury to the world that in your Encyclical the most influential of all religious
teachers has directed attention to the condition of labor.

But while we appreciate
the many wholesome truths you utter, while we feel, as all must feel,
that you are animated by a desire to help the suffering and oppressed
and to put an end to any idea that the church is divorced from the aspiration
for liberty and progress, yet it is painfully obvious to us that one fatal
assumption hides from you the cause of the evils you see, and makes it
impossible for you to propose any adequate remedy. This assumption is that
private property in land is of the same nature and has the same sanctions
as private property in things produced by labor. In spite of its undeniable
truths and its benevolent spirit, your Encyclical shows you to be involved
in such difficulties as a physician called to examine one suffering from
disease of the stomach would meet should he begin with a refusal to consider
the stomach.

Prevented by this
assumption from seeing the true cause, the only causes you find it possible
to assign for the growth of misery and wretchedness are the destruction
of working-men's guilds in the last century, the repudiation in public
institutions and laws of the ancient religion, rapacious usury, the custom
of working by contract, and the concentration of trade.

Such diagnosis
is manifestly inadequate to account for evils that are alike felt in
Catholic countries, in Protestant countries, in countries that adhere
to the Greek communion, and in countries where no religion is professed
by the state; that are alike felt in old countries and in new countries,
where industry is simple and where it is most elaborate, and amid all varieties
of industrial customs and relations.

But the real cause
will be clear if you will consider that since labor must find its workshop
and reservoir in land, the labor question is but another name for the
land question, and will re-examine your assumption that private property
in land is necessary and right.

See how fully adequate
is the cause I have pointed out. The most important of all the material relations
of man is his relation to the planet he inhabits, and hence the "impious
resistance to the benevolent intentions of his Creator", which as Bishop
Nulty says is involved in private property in land, must produce evils
wherever it exists. But by virtue of the law, "unto whom much is given, from
him much is required," the very progress of civilization makes the evils produced
by private property in land more widespread and intense.

What is producing
throughout the civilized world that condition of things you rightly describe
as intolerable is not this and that local error or minor mistake. It
is nothing less than the progress of civilization itself, nothing less
than the intellectual advance and the material growth in which our century
has been so pre-eminent, acting in a state of society based on private
property in land; nothing less than the new gifts that in our time God
has been showering on man, but which are being turned into scourges by man's
"impious resistance to the benevolent intentions of his Creator."

The discoveries
of science, the gains of invention, have given to us in this wonderful
century more than has been given to men in any time before, and, in a
degree so rapidly accelerating as to suggest geometrical progression, are
placing in our hands new material powers. But with the benefit comes the
obligation. In a civilization beginning to pulse with steam and electricity,
where the sun paints pictures and the phonograph stores speech, it will
not do to be merely as just as were our fathers. Intellectual advance and
material advance require corresponding moral advance. Knowledge and power
are neither good nor evil. They are not end but means—evolving forces that
if not controlled in orderly relations must take disorderly and destructive
forms. The deepening pain, the increasing perplexity, the growing discontent
for which, as you truly say, some remedy must be found and quickly found,
mean nothing less than that forces of destruction, swifter and more terrible
than those that have shattered every preceding civilization, are already
menacing ours—that if it does not quickly rise to a higher moral level,
if it does not become in deed as in word a Christian civilization, on the
wall of its splendor must flame the doom of Babylon: "Thou art weighed in
the balance and found wanting!"

One false assumption
prevents you from seeing the real cause and true significance of the
facts that have prompted your Encyclical. And it fatally fetters you when
you seek a remedy.

You state that
you approach the subject with confidence, yet in all that greater part
of the Encyclical (19–67) devoted to the remedy, while there is an abundance
of moral reflections and injunctions, excellent in themselves but dead
and meaningless as you apply them, the only definite practical proposals
for the improvement of the condition of labor are:

1. That the state
should step in to prevent overwork, to restrict the employment of women
and children, to secure in workshops conditions not unfavorable to health
and morals, and, at least where there is danger of insufficient wages
provoking strikes, to regulate wages (39–40).

2. That it should
encourage the acquisition of property (in land) by working-men (50–51).

3. That working-men's
associations should be formed (52–67).

These remedies,
so far as they go, are socialistic, and though the Encyclical is not
without recognition of the individual character of man and of the priority
of the individual and the family to the state, yet the whole tendency and
spirit of its remedial suggestions lean unmistakably to socialism—extremely
moderate socialism it is true; socialism hampered and emasculated by a
supreme respect for private possessions; yet socialism still. But, although
you frequently use the ambiguous term "private property" when the context
shows that you have in mind private property in land, the one thing clear
on the surface and becoming clearer still with examination is that you
insist that whatever else may be done, the private ownership of land
shall be left untouched!

I have already
referred generally to the defects that attach to all socialistic remedies
for the evil conditions of labor, but respect for your Holiness dictates
that I should speak specifically, even though briefly, of the remedies
proposed or suggested by you.

Of these the widest
and strongest are that the state should restrict the hours of labor,
the employment of women and children, the unsanitary conditions of workshops,
etc. Yet how little may in this way be accomplished.

A strong, absolute
ruler might hope by such regulations to alleviate the conditions of chattel-slaves.
But the tendency of our times is towards democracy, and democratic states
are necessarily weaker in paternalism, while in the industrial slavery,
growing out of private ownership of land, that prevails in Christendom
today, it is not the master who forces the slave to labor, but the slave
who urges the master to let him labor. Thus the greatest difficulty in
enforcing such regulations comes from those whom they are intended to benefit.
It is not, for instance, the masters who make it difficult to enforce restrictions
on child labor in factories, but the mothers who, prompted by poverty,
misrepresent the ages of their children even to the masters, and teach
the children to misrepresent.

But while in large
factories and mines regulations as to hours, ages, etc., though subject
to evasion and offering opportunities for extortion and corruption, may
be to some extent enforced, how can they have any effect in those far wider
branches of industry where the laborer works for himself or for small
employers?

All such remedies
are of the nature of the remedy for overcrowding that is generally prescribed
with them—the restriction under penalty of the number who may occupy
a room and the demolition of unsanitary buildings. Since these measures
have no tendency to increase house accommodation or to augment ability to
pay for it, the overcrowding that is forced back in some places goes on
in other places and to a worse degree. All such remedies begin at the wrong
end. They are like putting on brake and bit to hold in quietness horses that
are being lashed into frenzy; they are like trying to stop a locomotive by
holding its wheels instead of shutting off steam, like attempting to cure
smallpox by driving back its pustules. Men do not overwork themselves because
they like it; it is not in the nature of the mother's heart to send children
to work when they ought to be at play; it is not of choice that laborers
will work in dangerous and unsanitary conditions. These things, like overcrowding,
come from the sting of poverty. And so long as the poverty of which they
are the expression is left untouched, restrictions such as you endorse can
have only partial and evanescent results. The cause remaining, repression
in one place can only bring out its effects in other places, and the task
you assign to the state is as hopeless as to ask it to lower the level of
the ocean by bailing out the sea.

Nor can the state
cure poverty by regulating wages. It is as much beyond the power of the
state to regulate wages as it is to regulate the rates of interest. Usury
laws have been tried again and again, but the only effect they have ever
had has been to increase what the poorer borrowers must pay, and for the
same reasons that all attempts to lower by regulation the prices of goods
have always resulted merely in increasing them. The general rate of wages
is fixed by the ease or difficulty with which labor can obtain access to
land, ranging from the full earnings of labor, where land is free, to the
least on which laborers can live and reproduce, where land is fully monopolized.
Thus, where it has been comparatively easy for laborers to get land, as in
the United States and in Australasia, wages have been higher than in Europe
and it has been impossible to get European laborers to work there for wages
that they would gladly accept at home; while as monopolization goes on under
the influence of private property in land, wages tend to fall and the social
conditions of Europe to appear. Thus, under the partial yet substantial
recognition of common rights to land, of which I have spoken, the many attempts
of the British Parliament to reduce wages by regulation failed utterly. And
so when the institution of private property in land had done its work in
England, all attempts of Parliament to raise wages proved unavailing. In
the beginning of this century it was even attempted to increase the earnings
of laborers by grants in aid of wages. But the only result was to lower
commensurately what wages employers paid.
The state could maintain wages above the tendency
of the market (for, as I have shown, labor deprived of land becomes
a commodity) only by offering employment to all who wish it, or by lending
its sanction to strikes and supporting them with its funds. Thus it is
that the thorough-going states who want the state to take all industry
into its hands are much more logical than those timid states who propose
that the state should regulate private industry—but only a little!

The same hopelessness
attends your suggestion that working people should be encouraged by the
state in obtaining a share of the land. It is evident that by this you
mean that, as is now being attempted in Ireland, the state shall buy out
large landowners in favor of small ones, establishing what are known as
peasant proprietors. Supposing that this can be done even to a considerable
extent, what will be accomplished save to substitute a larger privileged
class for a smaller privileged class? What will be done for the still larger
class that must remain, the laborers of the agricultural districts, the workmen
of the towns, the proletarians of the cities? Is it not true, as Professor
De Laveleye says, that in such countries as Belgium, where peasant proprietary
exists, the tenants—for there still exist tenants—are rack-rented with
a mercilessness unknown in Ireland? Is it not true that in such countries
as Belgium the condition of the mere laborer is even worse than it is in
Great Britain, where large ownerships obtain? And if the state attempts to
buy up land for peasant proprietors, will not the effect be, what is seen
today in Ireland, to increase the market-value of land, and thus make it more
difficult for those not so favored, and for those who will come after, to
get land? How, moreover, on the principle which you declare (33), that "to
the state the interests of all are equal, whether high or low," will you
justify state aid to one man to buy a bit of land without also insisting
on state aid to another man to buy a donkey, to another to buy a shop, to
another to buy the tools and materials of a trade—state aid, in short, to
everybody who may be able to make good use of it or thinks that he could?
And are you not thus landed in communism—not the communism of the early Christians
and of the religious orders, but communism that uses the coercive power of
the state to take rightful property by force from those who have and give
to those who have not? For the state has no purse of Fortunatus; the state
cannot repeat the miracle of the loaves and fishes; all that the state can
give it must get by some form or other of the taxing power. And whether it
gives or lends money, or gives or lends credit, it cannot give to those who
have not, without taking from those who have.

But aside from
all this, any scheme of dividing up land while maintaining private property
in land is futile. Small holdings cannot coexist with the treatment of
land as private property where civilization is materially advancing and
wealth augments. We may see this in the economic tendencies that in ancient
times were the main cause that transformed world-conquering Italy from
a land of small farms to a land of great estates. We may see it in the
fact that while two centuries ago the majority of English farmers were
owners of the land they tilled, tenancy has been for a long time the all-but-universal
condition of the English farmer. And now the mighty forces of steam and
electricity have come to urge concentration. It is in the United States
that we may see on the largest scale how their power is operating to turn
a nation of landowners into a nation of tenants. The principle is clear
and irresistible. Material progress makes land more valuable, and when this
increasing value is left to private owners, land must pass from the ownership
of the poor into the ownership of the rich, just as diamonds so pass when
poor men find them. What the British government is attempting in Ireland
is to build snow houses in the Arabian desert! to plant bananas in Labrador!

There is one way,
and only one way, in which working people in our civilization may be
secured a share in the land of their country, and that is the way that
we propose—the taking of the profits of landownership for the community.

As to working-men's
associations, what your Holiness seems to contemplate is the formation
and encouragement of societies akin to the Catholic sodalities and to
the friendly and beneficial societies, like the Odd Fellows, which have
had a large extension in English-speaking countries. Such associations
may promote fraternity, extend social intercourse and provide assurance in
case of sickness or death, but if they go no further they are powerless to
affect wages even among their members. As to trades unions proper, it is
hard to define your position, which is perhaps best stated as one of warm
approbation provided that they do not go too far. For while you object to
strikes, while you reprehend societies that "do their best to get into their
hands the whole field of labor and to force working-men either to join them
or to starve", while you discountenance the coercion of employers and seem
to think that arbitration might take the place of strikes, yet you use expressions
and assert principles that are all that the trade unionist would ask, not
merely to justify the strike and the boycott but even the use of violence
where only violence would suffice. For you speak of the insufficient wages
of workmen as due to the greed of rich employers; you assume the moral right
of the workman to obtain employment from others at wages greater than
those others are willing freely to give; and you deny the right of any
one to work for such wages as he pleases, in such a way as to lead Mr.
Stead, in so widely read a journal as the Review of Reviews, approvingly
to declare that you regard "blacklegging", i.e. the working for less
than Union wages, as a crime.

To men conscious
of bitter injustice, to men steeped in poverty yet mocked by flaunting
wealth, such words mean more than I can think you realize!

When fire shall
be cool and ice be warm, when armies shall throw away lead and iron to
try conclusions by the pelting of rose leaves, such labor associations
as you are thinking of may be possible. But not till then. For labor associations
can do nothing to raise wages but by force. It may be force applied passively,
or force applied actively, or force held in reserve; but it must be
force. They must coerce or hold the power to coerce employers; they
must coerce those among their own members disposed to straggle; they
must do their best to get into their hands the whole field of labor they
seek to occupy and to force other working-men either to join them or to
starve. Those who tell you of trades unions bent on raising wages by moral
suasion alone are like those who would tell you of tigers that live on
oranges.

The condition of
the masses today is that of men pressed together in a hall where ingress is
open and more are constantly coming, but where the doors for egress are closed.
If forbidden to relieve the general pressure by throwing open those doors,
whose bars and bolts are private property in land, they can only mitigate
the pressure on themselves by forcing back others, and the weakest must
be driven to the wall. This is the way of labor unions and trade guilds.
Even those amiable societies that you recommend would, in their efforts
to find employment for their own members, necessarily displace others.

For even the philanthropy
which, recognizing the evil of trying to help labor by alms, seeks to
help men to help themselves—by finding them work—becomes aggressive in
the blind and bitter struggle that private property in land entails, and
in helping one set of men injures others. Thus to minimize the bitter
complaints of taking work from others and lessening the wages of others
in providing their own beneficiaries with work and wages, benevolent societies
are forced to devices akin to the digging of holes and filling them up again.
Our American societies feel this difficulty; General Booth encounters it
in England; and the Catholic societies, which your Holiness recommends must
find it when they are formed.

Your Holiness knows
of, and I am sure honors, the princely generosity of Baron Hirsch towards
his suffering co-religionists. But, as I write, the New York newspapers
contain accounts of an immense meeting held in Cooper Union, in this city,
on the evening of Friday, September 4, in which a number of Hebrew trades-unions
protested in the strongest manner against the loss of work and reduction
of wages that are being effected by Baron Hirsch's generosity in bringing
their own countrymen here and teaching them to work. The resolution unanimously
adopted at this great meeting thus concludes:

We now demand of Baron Hirsch himself that
he release us from his "charity" and take back the millions, which, instead
of a blessing, have proved a curse and a source of misery.

Nor does this show
that the members of these Hebrew labor-unions—who are themselves immigrants
of the same class as those Baron Hirsch is striving to help, for in the
next generation they lose with us their distinctiveness—are a whit less
generous than other men.

Labor associations
of the nature of trade guilds or unions are necessarily selfish; by the
law of their being they must fight for their own hand, regardless of
who is hurt; they ignore and must ignore the teaching of Christ that we
should do to others as we would have them do to us, which a true political
economy shows is the only way to the full emancipation of the masses.
They must do their best to starve workmen who do not join them; they must
by all means in their power force back the "blackleg", as the soldier
in battle must shoot down his mother's son if in the opposing ranks. And
who is the blackleg? A fellow-creature seeking work—a fellow-creature in
all probability more pressed and starved than those who so bitterly denounce
him, and often with the hungry pleading faces of wife and child behind
him.

And, in so far
as they succeed, what is it that trade-guilds and Unions do but to impose
more restrictions on natural rights; to create "trusts" in labor; to
add to privileged classes other somewhat privileged classes and to press
the weaker closer to the wall?

I speak without
prejudice against trades-unions, of which I was for years an active member.
And in pointing out to your Holiness that their principle is selfish
and incapable of large and permanent benefits, and that their methods
violate natural rights and work hardship and injustice, I am only saying
to you what, both in my books and by word of mouth, I have said over and
over again to them. Nor is what I say capable of dispute. Intelligent Trades
Unionists know it, and the less intelligent vaguely feel it. And even
those of the classes of wealth and leisure, who as if to head off the demand
for natural rights are preaching trades-unionism to working-men, must needs
admit it.

Your Holiness will
remember the great London dock strike of two years ago, which, with that
of other influential men, received the moral support of that Prince of the
Church whom we of the English speech hold higher and dearer than any prelate
has been held by us since the blood of Thomas à Becket stained the
Canterbury altar.

In a volume called
The Story of the Dockers' Strike, written by Messrs. H. Llewellyn Smith
and Vaughan Nash, with an introduction by Sydney Buxton, M.P., which advocates
trades-unionism as the solution of the labor question, and of which
a large number were sent to Australia as a sort of official recognition
of the generous aid received from there by the strikers, I find in the
summing up, on pages 164–165, the following:

If the settlement lasts, work at the docks
will be more regular, better paid, and carried on under better conditions
than ever before. All this will be an unqualified gain to those who get
the benefit from it. But another result will undoubtedly be to contract
the field of employment and lessen the number of those for whom work can
be found. The lower-class casual will, in the end, find his position
more precarious than ever before, in proportion to the increased regularity
of work, which the "fitter" of the laborers will secure. The effect of the
organization of dock labor, as of all classes of labor, will be to squeeze
out the residuum. The loafer, the cadger, the failure in the industrial
race—the members of "Class B" of Mr. Charles Booth's hierarchy of social
classes—will be no gainers by the change, but will rather find another
door closed against them, and this in many cases the last door to
employment.

I am far from wishing
that your Holiness should join in that pharisaical denunciation of
trades-unions common among those who, while quick to point out the injustice
of trades unions in denying to others the equal right to work, are themselves
supporters of that more primary injustice that denies the equal right
to the standing place and natural material necessary to work. What I wish
to point out is that trades unionism, while it may be a partial palliative,
is not a remedy, that it has not that moral character which could alone
justify one in the position of your Holiness in urging it as good in itself.
Yet, so long as you insist on private property in land what better can
you do?

V

In the beginning
of the Encyclical you declare that the responsibility of the apostolical
office urges your Holiness to treat the question of the condition of
labor "expressly and at length, in order that there may be no mistake
as to the principles which truth and justice dictate for its settlement."
But, blinded by one false assumption, you do not see even fundamentals.

You assume that
the labor question is a question between wage-workers and their employers.
But working for wages is not the primary or exclusive occupation of
labor. Primarily, men work for themselves, without the intervention
of an employer. And the primary source of wages is in the earnings of
labor, the man who works for himself and consumes his own products receiving
his wages in the fruits of his labor. Are not fishermen, boatmen, cab drivers,
peddlers, working farmers—all, in short, of the many workers who get their
wages directly by the sale of their services or products without the medium
of an employer—as much laborers as those who work for the specific wages
of an employer? In your consideration of remedies you do not seem even
to have thought of them. Yet in reality the laborers who work for themselves
are the first to be considered, since what men will be willing to accept
from employers depends manifestly on what they can get by working for
themselves.

You assume that
all employers are rich men, who might raise wages much higher were
they not so grasping. But is it not the fact that the great majority
of employers are in reality as much pressed by competition as their
workmen, many of them constantly on the verge of failure? Such employers
could not possibly raise the wages they pay, however they might wish
to, unless all others were compelled to do so.

You assume that
there are in the natural order two classes, the rich and the poor,
and that laborers naturally belong to the poor.

It is true, as
you say, that there are natural differences in capacity, in diligence, in
health, and in strength, that may produce differences in fortune. These however
are not the differences that divide men into rich and poor. The natural differences
in powers and aptitudes are certainly not greater than are natural
differences in stature. But while it is only by selecting giants and
dwarfs that we can find men twice as tall as others, yet in the difference
between rich and poor that exists today we find some men richer than other
men by the thousandfold and the millionfold.

Nowhere do these
differences between wealth and poverty coincide with differences in
individual powers and aptitudes. The real difference between rich and
poor is the difference between those who hold the toll gates and those
who pay toll—between tribute-receivers and tribute-yielders.

In what way does
nature justify such a difference? In the numberless varieties of animated
nature we find some species that are evidently intended to live on
other species. But their relations are always marked by unmistakable
differences in size, shape, or organs. To man has been given dominion
over all the other living things that tenant the earth. But is not this
mastery indicated even in externals, so that no one can fail on sight
to distinguish between a man and one of the inferior animals? Our American
apologists for slavery used to contend that the black skin and woolly
hair of the Negro indicated the intent of Nature that the black should
serve the white; but the difference that you assume to be natural is
between men of the same race. What difference does Nature show between
such men as would indicate her intent that one should live idly, yet
be rich, and the other should work hard, yet be poor? If I could bring
you from the United States a man who has $200,000,000 and one who is glad
to work for a few dollars a week, and place them side by side in your
antechamber, would you—even were you to call in the most skilled anatomist—be
able to tell which was which? Is it not clear that God in no way countenances
or condones the division of rich and poor that exists today or in any
way permits it, except as, having given them free will, He permits men
to choose either good or evil, and to avoid heaven if they prefer hell?
For is it not clear that the division of men into the classes rich and
poor has invariably its origin in force and fraud, invariably involves
violation of the moral law, and is really a division into those who get
the profits of robbery and those who are robbed—those who hold in exclusive
possession what God made for all, and those who are deprived of His bounty?
Did not Christ in all His utterances and parables show that the gross difference
between rich and poor is opposed to God's law? Would He have condemned the
rich so strongly as He did if the class distinction between rich and poor
did not involve injustice—was not opposed to God's intent?

It seems to us
that your Holiness misses its real significance in intimating that Christ,
in becoming the son of a carpenter and Himself working as a carpenter, showed
merely that "there is nothing to be ashamed of in seeking one's bread
by labor." To say that is almost like saying that by not robbing people
He showed that there is nothing to be ashamed of in honesty! If you will
consider how true in any large view is the classification of all men into
working-men, beggar-men and thieves, you will see that it was morally
impossible that Christ during His stay on earth should have been anything
else than a working-man, since He who came to fulfil the law must by deed
as well as word obey God's law of labor.

See how fully and
how beautifully Christ's life on earth illustrated this law. Entering
our earthly life in the weakness of infancy, as it is appointed that
all should enter it, He lovingly took what in the natural order is lovingly
rendered, the sustenance, secured by labor, that one generation owes
to its immediate successors. Arrived at maturity, He earned His own subsistence
by that common labor in which the majority of men must and do earn it.
Then passing to a higher—to the very highest—sphere of labor, He earned
His subsistence by the teaching of moral and spiritual truths, receiving
its material wages in the love offerings of grateful hearers, and not refusing
the costly spikenard with which Mary anointed His feet. So, when He chose
His disciples, He did not go to landowners or other monopolists who live
on the labor of others, but to common laboring men. And when He called
them to a higher sphere of labor and sent them out to teach moral and spiritual
truths, He told them to take, without condescension on the one hand or
sense of degradation on the other, the loving return for such labor, saying
to them that "the laborer is worthy of his hire," thus showing, what we
hold, that all labor does not consist in what is called manual labor, but
that whoever helps to add to the material, intellectual, moral, or spiritual
fullness of life is also a laborer.(5)

In assuming that
laborers, even ordinary manual laborers, are naturally poor, you ignore
the fact that labor is the producer of wealth, and attribute to the
natural law of the Creator an injustice that comes from man's impious
violation of His benevolent intention. In the rudest stage of the arts
it is possible, where justice prevails, for all well men to earn a living.
With the labor-saving appliances of our time, it should be possible
for all to earn much more. And so, in saying that poverty is no disgrace,
you convey an unreasonable implication. For poverty ought to
be a disgrace, since in a condition of social justice, it would, where
unsought from religious motives or unimposed by unavoidable misfortune,
imply recklessness or laziness.

The sympathy of
your Holiness seems exclusively directed to the poor, the workers.
Ought this to be so? Are not the rich, the idlers, to be pitied also?
By the word of the Gospel it is the rich rather than the poor who call
for pity, for the presumption is that they will share the fate of Dives.
And to any one who believes in a future life the condition of him who
wakes to find his cherished millions left behind must seem pitiful. But
even in this life, how really pitiable are the rich. The evil is not in
wealth in itself, in its command over material things; it is in the possession
of wealth while others are steeped in poverty, in being raised above touch
with the life of humanity, from its work and its struggles, its hopes and
its fears, and above all from the love that sweetens life, and the kindly
sympathies and generous acts that strengthen faith in man and trust in God.
Consider how the rich see the meaner side of human nature; how they are
surrounded by flatterers and sycophants; how they find ready instruments
not only to gratify vicious impulses, but to prompt and stimulate them; how
they must constantly be on guard lest they be swindled; how often they must
suspect an ulterior motive behind a kindly deed or friendly word; how, if
they try to be generous, they are beset by shameless beggars and scheming
impostors; how often the family affections are chilled for them, and their
deaths anticipated with the ill-concealed joy of expectant possession. The
worst evil of poverty is not in the want of material things, but in the stunting
and distortion of the higher qualities. So, though in another way, the possession
of unearned wealth likewise stunts and distorts what is noblest in man.

God's commands
cannot be evaded with impunity. If it be God's command that men shall earn
their bread by labor, the idle rich must suffer. And they do. See the utter
vacancy of the lives of those who live for pleasure; see the loathsome vices
bred in a class who, surrounded by poverty, are sated with wealth. See that
terrible punishment of ennui, of which the poor know so little that they
cannot understand it; see the pessimism that grows among the wealthy classes—that
shuts out God, that despises men, that deems existence in itself an evil
and, fearing death, yet longs for annihilation.

When Christ told
the rich young man who sought Him to sell all he had and to give it
to the poor, He was not thinking of the poor, but of the young man. And
I doubt not that among the rich and especially among the self-made rich,
there are many who, at times at least, feel keenly the folly of their riches
and fear for the dangers and temptations to which these expose their children.
But the strength of long habit, the promptings of pride, the excitement
of making and holding what have become for them the counters in a game
of cards, the family expectations that have assumed the character of rights,
and the real difficulty they find in making any good use of their wealth,
bind them to their burden like a weary donkey to his pack, till they
stumble on the precipice that bounds this life.

Men who are sure
of getting food when they shall need it eat only what appetite dictates.
But with the sparse tribes who exist on the verge of the habitable globe,
life is either a famine or a feast. Enduring hunger for days, the fear
of it prompts them to gorge like anacondas when successful in their quest
of game. And so, what gives wealth its curse is what drives men to seek
it, what makes it so envied and admired—the fear of want. As the unduly
rich are the corollary of the unduly poor, so is the soul-destroying quality
of riches but the reflex of the want that embrutes and degrades. The real
evil lies in the injustice from which unnatural possession and unnatural
deprivation both spring.

But this injustice
can hardly be blamed on individuals or classes. The existence of private
property in land is a great social wrong from which society at large
suffers and of which the very rich and the very poor are alike victims,
though at the opposite extremes. Seeing this, it seems to us like a violation
of Christian charity to speak of the rich as though they individually
were responsible for the sufferings of the poor. Yet, while you do this,
you insist that the cause of monstrous wealth and degrading poverty shall
not be touched. Here is a man with a disfiguring and dangerous excrescence.
One physician would kindly, gently, but firmly remove it. Another insists
that it shall not be removed, but at the same time holds up the poor victim
to hatred and ridicule. Which is right?

In seeking to restore
all men to their equal and natural rights, we do not seek the benefit
of any class, but of all. For we both know by faith and see by fact that
injustice can profit no one and that justice must benefit all.

Nor do we seek
any "futile and ridiculous equality". We recognize, with you, that there
must always be differences and inequalities. In so far as these are in conformity
with the moral law, in so far as they do not violate the command "Thou
shalt not steal," we are content. We do not seek to better God's work;
we seek only to do His will. The equality we would bring about is not
the equality of fortune, but the equality of natural opportunity, the
equality that reason and religion alike proclaim—the equality in usufruct
of all His children to the bounty of Our Father who art in Heaven.

And in taking for
the uses of society what we clearly see is the great fund intended
for society in the divine order, we would not levy the slightest tax
on the possessors of wealth, no matter how rich they might be. Not only
do we deem such taxes a violation of the right of property, but we see
that by virtue of beautiful adaptations in the economic laws of the Creator,
it is impossible for any one honestly to acquire wealth without at the
same time adding to the wealth of the world.

To persist in a
wrong, to refuse to undo it, is always to become involved in other
wrongs. Those who defend private property in land and thereby deny
the first and most important of all human rights, the equal right to
the material substratum of life, are compelled to one of two courses.
Either they must, as do those whose gospel is "Devil take the hindermost,"
deny the equal right to life, and by some theory like that to which the
English clergyman Malthus has given his name, assert that Nature (they
do not venture to say God) brings into the world more men than there is
provision for. Or they must, as do the states, assert as rights what in
themselves are wrongs.

Your Holiness in
the Encyclical gives an example of this. Denying the equality of right
to the material basis of life, and yet conscious that there is a right
to live, you assert the right of laborers to employment and their right
to receive from their employers a certain indefinite wage. No such rights
exist. No one has a right to demand employment of another, or to demand
higher wages than the other is willing to give, or in any way to put pressure
on another to make him raise such wages against his will. There can be
no better moral justification for such demands on employers by working-men
than there would be for employers demanding that working-men shall be compelled
to work for them when they do not want to, and to accept wages lower than
they are willing to take. Any seeming justification springs from a prior
wrong—the denial to working-men of their natural rights—and can in the last
analysis rest only on that supreme dictate of self-preservation that under
extraordinary circumstances makes pardonable what in itself is theft, or
sacrilege, or even murder.

A fugitive slave
with the bloodhounds of his pursuers baying at his heels would in true
Christian morals be held blameless if he seized the first horse he came
across, even though to take it he had to knock down the rider. But this
is not to justify horse-stealing as an ordinary means of travelling.

When His disciples
were hungry Christ permitted them to pluck corn on the Sabbath day.
But He never denied the sanctity of the Sabbath by asserting that it
was under ordinary circumstances a proper time to gather corn.

He justified David,
who when pressed by hunger committed what ordinarily would be sacrilege,
by taking from the temple the loaves of proposition. But in this He
was far from saying that the robbing of temples was a proper way of getting
a living.

In the Encyclical,
however, you commend the application to the ordinary relations of life,
under normal conditions, of principles that in ethics are only to be
tolerated under extraordinary conditions. You are driven to this assertion
of false rights by your denial of true rights. The natural right which
each man has is not that of demanding employment or wages from another
man, but that of employing himself—that of applying by his own labor to
the inexhaustible storehouse which the Creator has, in the land, provided
for all men. Were that storehouse open, as by the single tax we would
open it, the natural demand for labor would keep pace with the supply,
the man who sold labor and the man who bought it would become free exchangers
for mutual advantage and all cause for dispute between workman and employer
would be gone. For then, all being free to employ themselves, the mere opportunity
to labor would cease to seem a boon; and since no one would work for another
for less, all things considered, than he could earn by working for himself,
wages would necessarily rise to their full value, and the relations of
workman and employer be regulated by mutual interest and convenience.

This is the only
way in which they can be satisfactorily regulated.

Your Holiness seems
to assume that there is some just rate of wages that employers ought
to be willing to pay and that laborers should be content to receive,
and to imagine that if this were secured there would be an end of strife.
This rate you evidently think of as that which will give working-men a frugal
living, and perhaps enable them by hard work and strict economy to lay
by a little something.

But how can a just
rate of wages be fixed without the "higgling of the market" any more
than the just price of corn or pigs or ships or paintings can be so
fixed? And would not arbitrary regulation in the one case, as in the
other, check that interplay that most effectively promotes the economical
adjustment of productive forces? Why should buyers of labor, any more
than buyers of commodities, be called on to pay higher prices than in
a free market they are compelled to pay? Why should the sellers of labor
be content with anything less than in a free market they can obtain? Why
should working-men be content with frugal fare when the world is so rich?
Why should they be satisfied with a lifetime of toil and stinting, when
the world is so beautiful? Why should not they also desire to gratify the
higher instincts, the finer tastes? Why should they be forever content to
travel in the steerage when others find the cabin more enjoyable?

Nor will they.
The ferment of our time does not arise merely from the fact that working-men
find it harder to live on the same scale of comfort. It is also and perhaps
still more largely due to the increase of their desires with an improved
scale of comfort. This increase of desire must continue. For working-men
are men. And man is the unsatisfied animal.

He is not an ox,
of whom it may be said: so much grass, so much grain, so much water,
and a little salt, and he will be content. On the contrary, the more
he gets the more he craves. When he has enough food, then he wants better
food. When he gets a shelter, then he wants a more commodious and tasty
one. When his animal needs are satisfied, then mental and spiritual desires
arise.

This restless discontent
is of the nature of man—of that nobler nature that raises him above
the animals by so immeasurable a gulf and shows him to be indeed created
in the likeness of God. It is not to be quarrelled with, for it is the
motor of all progress. It is this that has raised St. Peter's dome and
on dull, dead canvas made the angelic face of the Madonna to glow; it
is this that has weighed suns and analyzed stars, and opened page after
page of the wonderful works of creative intelligence; it is this that has
narrowed the Atlantic to an ocean ferry and trained the lightning to carry
our messages to the remotest lands: it is this that is opening to us possibilities
beside which all that our modern civilization has as yet accomplished seem
small. Nor can it be repressed save by degrading and embruting men; by reducing
Europe to Asia.

Hence, short of
what wages may be earned when all restrictions on labor are removed and
access to natural opportunities on equal terms secured to all, it is
impossible to fix any rate of wages that will be deemed just, or any rate
of wages that can prevent working-men striving to get more. So far from
it making working-men more contented to improve their condition a little,
it is certain to make them more discontented.

Nor are you asking
justice when you ask employers to pay their working-men more than they
are compelled to pay—more than they could get others to do the work
for. You are asking charity. For the surplus that the rich employer thus
gives is not in reality wages; it is essentially alms.

In speaking of
the practical measures for the improvement of the condition of labor which
your Holiness suggests, I had not mentioned what you place much stress upon—charity.
But there is nothing practical in such recommendations as a cure for
poverty, nor will any one so consider them. If it were possible for
the giving of alms to abolish poverty, there would be no poverty in Christendom.

Charity is indeed
a noble and beautiful virtue, grateful to man and approved by God.
But charity must be built on justice. It cannot supersede justice.

What is wrong with
the condition of labor through the Christian world is that labor is
robbed. And while you justify the continuance of that robbery it is
idle to urge charity. To do so—to commend charity as a substitute for
justice—is indeed something akin in essence to those heresies, condemned
by your predecessors, that taught that the Gospel had superseded the
law, and that the love of God exempted men from moral obligations.

All that charity
can do where injustice exists is here and there to mollify somewhat
the effects of injustice. It cannot cure them. Nor is even what little
it can do, to mollify the effects of injustice, without evil. For what
may be called the superimposed and, in this sense, secondary virtues work
evil where the fundamental or primary virtues are absent. Thus sobriety
is a virtue and diligence is a virtue; but a sober and diligent thief is
all the more dangerous. Thus patience is a virtue; but patience under wrong
is the condoning of wrong. Thus it is a virtue to seek knowledge and to
endeavor to cultivate the mental powers. But the wicked man becomes more
capable of evil by reason of his intelligence. Devils we always think of
as intelligent.

And thus that pseudo-charity
that discards and denies justice works evil. On the one side it demoralizes
its recipients, outraging that human dignity which, as you say, "God
himself treats with reverence," and turning into beggars and paupers
men who, to become self-supporting, self-respecting citizens, need only
the restitution of what God has given them. On the other side, it acts
as an anodyne to the consciences of those who are living on the robbery
of their fellows, and fosters that moral delusion and spiritual pride that
Christ doubtless had in mind when He said it was easier for a camel to pass
through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of
Heaven. For it leads men steeped in injustice, and using their money and
their influence to bolster up injustice, to think that in giving alms they
are doing something more than their duty towards man and deserve to be very
well thought of by God, and in a vague way to attribute to their own goodness
what really belongs to God's goodness. For consider: Who is the All-Provider?
Who is it that, as you say, owes to man a storehouse that shall never fail,
and which he finds only in the inexhaustible fertility of the earth? Is
it not God? And when, therefore, men deprived of the bounty of their God
are made dependent on the bounty of their fellow-creatures, are not these
creatures, as it were, put in the place of God, to take credit to themselves
for paying obligations that you yourself say God owes?

But worse perhaps
than all else is the way in which this substituting of vague injunctions
to charity for the clear-cut demands of justice opens an easy means
for the professed teachers of the Christian religion, of all branches
and communions, to placate Mammon while persuading themselves that they
are serving God. Had the English clergy not subordinated the teaching
of justice to the teaching of charity—to go no further in illustrating
a principle of which the whole history of Christendom from Constantine's
time to our own is witness—the Tudor tyranny would never have arisen, and
the separation of the Church been averted; had the clergy of France never
substituted charity for justice, the monstrous iniquities of the ancient
régime would never have brought the horrors of the Great Revolution;
and in my own country, had those who should have preached justice not
satisfied themselves with preaching kindness, chattel-slavery could never
have demanded the holocaust of our civil war.

No, your Holiness;
as faith without works is dead, as men cannot give to God His due while
denying to their fellows the rights He gave them, so charity unsupported
by justice can do nothing to solve the problem of the existing condition
of labor. Though the rich were to "bestow all their goods to feed the
poor and give their bodies to be burned," poverty would continue while
property in land continues.

Take the case of
the rich man today who is honestly desirous of devoting his wealth
to the improvement of the condition of labor. What can he do?

Bestow his
wealth on those who need it? He may help some who deserve it, but will
not improve general conditions. And against the good he may do will
be the danger of doing harm.

Build churches?
Under the shadow of churches poverty festers and the vice that is born
of it breeds!

Build schools
and colleges? Save as it may lead men to see the iniquity of private
property in land, increased education can effect nothing for mere laborers,
for as education is diffused the wages of education sink.

Establish
hospitals? Why, already it seems to laborers that there are too many
seeking work, and to save and prolong life is to add to the pressure!

Build model
tenements? Unless he cheapens house accommodation he but drives further
the class he would benefit, and as he cheapens house accommodation he
brings more to seek employment, and cheapens wages.

Institute
laboratories, scientific schools, workshops for physical experiments?
He but stimulates invention and discovery—the very forces that, acting
on a society based on private property in land, are crushing labor as between
the upper and the nether millstone!

Promote emigration
from places where wages are low to places where they are somewhat higher?
If he does, even those whom he at first helps to emigrate will soon
turn on him to demand that such emigration shall be stopped as reducing
their wages.

Give away
what land he may have, or refuse to take rent for it, or let it at
lower rents than the market price? He will simply make new landowners
or partial landowners; he may make some individuals the richer, but
he will do nothing to improve the general condition of labor.

Or, bethinking
himself of those public-spirited citizens of classic times who spent great
sums in improving their native cities, shall he try to beautify the city
of his birth or adoption? Let him widen and straighten narrow and crooked
streets, let him build parks and erect fountains, let him open tramways and
bring in railroads or in any way make beautiful and attractive his chosen
city, and what will be the result? Must it not be that those who appropriate
God's bounty will take his also? Will it not be that the value of land will
go up, and that the net result of his benefactions will be an increase of
rents and a bounty to landowners? Why, even the mere announcement that he
is going to do such things will start speculation and send up the value of
land by leaps and bounds.

What, then, can
the rich man do to improve the condition of labor?

He can do nothing
at all except to use his strength for the abolition of the great primary
wrong that robs men of their birthright. The justice of God laughs at
the attempts of men to substitute anything else for it.

If, when in speaking
of the practical measures your Holiness proposes, I did not note the
moral injunctions that the Encyclical contains, it is not because we
do not think morality practical. On the contrary, it seems to us that
in the teachings of morality is to be found the highest practicality,
and that the question "What is wise?" may always safely be subordinated
to the question "What is right?" But your Holiness in the Encyclical expressly
deprives the moral truths you state of all real bearing on the condition
of labor, just as the American people, by their legalization of chattel-slavery,
used to deprive of all practical meaning the declaration they deem their
fundamental charter and were accustomed to read solemnly on every national
anniversary. That declaration asserts that "We hold these truths to be
self-evident—that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their
Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty,
and the pursuit of happiness." But what did this truth mean on the lips
of men who asserted that one man was the rightful property of another man
who had bought him; who asserted that the slave was robbing the master
in running away, and that the man or the woman who helped the fugitive to
escape, or even gave him a cup of cold water in Christ's name, was an accessory
to theft, on whose head the penalties of the state should be visited?

Consider the moral teachings of the
Encyclical:

You tell
us that God owes to man an inexhaustible storehouse which he finds only in
the land. Yet you support a system that denies to the great majority of men
all right of recourse to this storehouse.

You tell
us that the necessity of labor is a consequence of original sin. Yet you
support a system that exempts a privileged class from the necessity for labor,
and enables them to shift their share and much more than their share of labor
on others.

You tell
us that God has not created us for the perishable and transitory things of
earth, but has given us this world as a place of exile and not as our true
country. Yet you tell us that some of the exiles have the exclusive right
of ownership in this place of common exile, so that they may compel their
fellow-exiles to pay them for sojourning here, and that this exclusive
ownership they may transfer to other exiles yet to come, with the same right
of excluding their fellows.

You tell
us that virtue is the common inheritance of all; that all men are children
of God the common Father; that all have the same last end; that all are redeemed
by Jesus Christ; that the blessings of nature and the gifts of grace
belong in common to all, and that to all except the unworthy is promised
the inheritance of the Kingdom of Heaven! Yet in all this and through
all this you insist, as a moral duty, on the maintenance of a system that
makes the reservoir of all God's material bounties and blessings to man
the exclusive property of a few of their number—you give us equal rights
in heaven but deny us equal rights on earth!

It was said of
a famous decision of the Supreme Court of the United States made just before
the civil war, in a fugitive slave case, that "it gave the law to the
North and the nigger to the South". It is thus that your Encyclical
gives the Gospel to laborers and the earth to the landlords. Is it really
to be wondered at that there are those who sneeringly say, "The priests
are ready enough to give the poor an equal share in all that is out of
sight, but they take precious good care that the rich shall keep a tight
grip on all that is within sight"?

Herein is the reason
why the working masses all over the world are turning away from organized
religion.

Any why should
they not? What is the office of religion if not to point out the principles
that ought to govern the conduct of men towards each other; to furnish a
clear, decisive rule of right which shall guide men in all the relations
of life—in the workshop, in the mart, in the forum and in the senate, as
well as in the church; to supply as it were a compass by which, amid the
blasts of passion, the aberrations of greed, and the delusions of a short-sighted
expediency, men may safely steer? What is the use of a religion that stands
palsied and paltering in the face of the most momentous problems? What is
the use of a religion that, whatever it may promise for the next world, can
do nothing to prevent injustice in this? Early Christianity was not such
a religion, else it would never have encountered the Roman persecutions;
else it would never have swept the Roman world. The sceptical masters of
Rome, tolerant of all gods, careless of what they deemed vulgar superstitions,
were keenly sensitive to a doctrine based on equal rights; they feared instinctively
a religion that inspired slave and proletarian with a new hope, that took
for its central figure a crucified carpenter, that taught the equal fatherhood
of God and the equal brotherhood of men, that looked for the speedy
reign of justice, and that prayed, "Thy Kingdom come on Earth!"

Today, the same
perceptions, the same aspirations, exist among the masses. Man is,
as he has been called, a religious animal, and can never quite rid himself
of the feeling that there is some moral government of the world, some
eternal distinction between wrong and right—can never quite abandon
the yearning for a reign of righteousness. And today men who, as they
think, have cast off all belief in religion will tell you, even though
they know not what it is, that with regard to the condition of labor
something is wrong! If theology be, as St. Thomas of
Aquin held it, the sum and focus of the sciences, is it not the business
of religion to say clearly and fearlessly what that wrong is? It was by
a deep impulse that of old, when threatened and perplexed by general disaster,
men came to the oracles to ask, "In what have we offended the gods?" Today,
menaced by growing evils that threaten the very existence of society,
men conscious that something is wrong are putting the same question to
the ministers of religion. What is the answer they get? Alas, with few
exceptions it is as vague, as inadequate, as the answers that used to
come from heathen oracles.

Is it any wonder that the masses of
men are losing faith?

Let me again state the case that your
Encyclical presents.

What is that condition
of labor which as you truly say is "the question of the hour" and "fills
every mind with painful apprehension"? Reduced to its lowest expression
it is the poverty of men willing to work. And what is the lowest expression
of this phrase? It is that they lack bread—for in that one word we most
concisely and strongly express all the manifold material satisfactions
needed by humanity, the absence of which constitutes poverty.

Now, what is the
prayer of Christendom—the universal prayer, the prayer that goes up
daily and hourly wherever the name of Christ is honored, that ascends
from your Holiness at the high altar of St. Peter's, and that is repeated
by the youngest child that the poorest Christian mother has taught to
lisp a request to her Father in Heaven? It is, "Give us this day our daily
bread"!

Yet where this
prayer goes up, daily and hourly, men lack bread. Is it not the business
of religion to say why? If it cannot do so, shall not scoffers mock its ministers
as Elias mocked the prophets of Baal, saying, "Cry with a louder voice, for
he is a god; and perhaps he is talking, or is in an inn, or on a journey,
or perhaps he is asleep, and must be awakened?" What answer can those ministers
give? Either there is no God, or He is asleep, or else He does give
men their daily bread and it is in some way intercepted.

Here is the answer,
the only true answer: If men lack bread, it is not that God has not
done His part in providing it. If men willing to labor are cursed with
poverty, it is not that the storehouse that God owes men has failed,
that the daily supply He has promised for the daily wants of His children
is not here in abundance. It is that, impiously violating the benevolent
intentions of their Creator, men have made land private property, and thus
given into the exclusive ownership of the few the provision that a bountiful
Father has made for all.

Any other answer
than that, no matter how it may be shrouded in the mere forms of religion,
is practically an atheistical answer.

_____________

I have written
this letter not alone for your Holiness, but for all whom I may hope it to
reach. But in sending it to you personally and in advance of publication,
I trust that it may be by you personally read and weighed. In setting forth
the grounds of our belief, and in pointing out considerations which it seems
to us you have unfortunately overlooked, I have written frankly, as was my
duty on a matter of such momentous importance, and as I am sure you would
have me write. But I trust I have done so without offense. For your office
I have profound respect, for yourself personally the highest esteem. And
while the views I have opposed seem to us erroneous and dangerous, we do
not wish to be understood as in the slightest degree questioning either your
sincerity or intelligence in adopting them. For they are views all but universally
held by the professed religious teachers of Christendom, in all communions
and creeds, and that have received the sanction of those looked to as the
wise and learned. Under the conditions that have surrounded you, and under
the pressure of so many high duties and responsibilities, culminating in
those of your present exalted position, it is not to be expected that you
should have hitherto thought to question them. But I trust that the considerations
herein set forth may induce you to do so, and even if the burdens and
cares that beset you shall now make impossible the careful consideration
that should precede expression by one in your responsible position, I
trust that what I have written may not be without use to others.

And, as I have
said, we are deeply grateful for your Encyclical. It is much that by so conspicuously
calling attention to the condition of labor, you have recalled the
fact forgotten by so many, that the social evils and problems of our
time directly and pressingly concern the Church. It is much that you
should thus have placed the stamp of your disapproval on that impious
doctrine which directly and by implication has been so long and so widely
preached in the name of Christianity, that the sufferings of the poor are
due to mysterious decrees of Providence which men may lament but cannot
alter. Your Encyclical will be seen by those who carefully analyze it to
be directed not against Socialism, which in moderate form you favor, but
against what we in the United States call the single tax. Yet we have no
solicitude for the truth save that it shall be brought into discussion,
and we recognize in your Holiness's Encyclical a most efficient means of
promoting discussion, and of promoting discussion along the lines that
we deem of the greatest importance—the lines of morality and religion.
In this you deserve the gratitude of all who would follow truth, for it
is of the nature of truth always to prevail over error where discussion
goes on.

And the truth for
which we stand has now made such progress in the minds of men that
it must be heard, that it can never be stifled, that it must go on conquering
and to conquer. Far off Australia leads the van and has already taken
the first steps towards the single tax. In Great Britain, in the United
States, and in Canada, the question is on the verge of practical politics
and soon will be the burning issue of the time. Continental Europe cannot
long linger behind. Faster than ever the world is moving.

Forty years ago
slavery seemed stronger in the United States than ever before, and
the market price of slaves—both working slaves and breeding slaves—was
higher than it had ever been before, for the title of the owner seemed
growing more secure. In the shadow of the Hall where the equal rights
of man had been solemnly proclaimed, the manacled fugitive was dragged
back to bondage, and on what to American tradition was our Marathon of
freedom, the slave master boasted that he would yet call the roll of his
chattels.

Yet forty years
ago, though the party that was to place Abraham Lincoln in the Presidential
chair had not been formed and nearly a decade was yet to pass ere the
signal gun was to ring out, slavery, as we may now see, was doomed.

Today a wider,
deeper, more beneficent revolution is brooding, not over one country but
over the world. God's truth impels it, and forces mightier than He has ever
before given to man urge it on. It is no more in the power of vested wrongs
to stay it than it is in man's power to stay the sun. The stars in their
courses fight against Sisera, and in the ferment of today, to him who hath
ears to hear, the doom of industrial slavery is sealed.

Where shall the
dignitaries of the Church be in the struggle that is coming—nay, that
is already here? On the side of justice and liberty, or on the side of
wrong and slavery? with the delivered when the timbrels shall sound again,
or with the chariots and the horsemen that again shall be engulfed in the
sea?

As to the masses,
there is little fear where they will be. Already, among those who hold
it with religious fervor, the single tax counts great numbers of Catholics—many
priests, secular and regular, and at least some bishops—while there
is no communion or denomination, of the many into which English-speaking
Christians are divided, where its advocates are not to be found.

Last Sunday evening
in the New York church that of all churches in the world is most richly
endowed, I saw the Cross carried through its aisles by a hundred choristers
and heard a priest of that English branch of the Church, that three
hundred years since was separated from your obedience, declare to a
great congregation that the labor question was at bottom a religious
question, that it could only be settled on the basis of moral right,
that the first and clearest of rights is the equal right to the use of
the physical basis of all life, and that no human titles could set aside
God's gift of the land to all men.

And as the Cross moved by and the choristers
sang,

Raise
ye the Christian's war-cry—
The Cross of Christ
the Lord!

men to whom it was a new thing bowed their
heads, and in hearts long steeled against the Church as the willing
handmaid of oppression, rose the "God wills it!" of the grandest and
mightiest of crusades.

Servant of the
Servants of God! I call you by the strongest and sweetest of your titles.
In your hands more than in those of any living man lies the power to say
the word and make the sign that shall end an unnatural divorce, and marry
again to religion all that is pure and high in social aspiration.

Wishing for your
Holiness the chiefest of all blessings, that you may know the truth
and be freed by the truth; wishing for you the days and the strength
that may enable you, by the great service you may render to humanity,
to make your pontificate through all coming time most glorious; and with
the profound respect due to your personal character and to your exalted
office, I am,

Yours sincerely,
Henry George.
NEW YORK, September 11, 1891.

Notes:

Note 1:As to this point, it may be well to add that all
economists are agreed that the taxes on land-values irrespective of
improvement or use—or what in the terminology of political economy is
styled rent, a term distinguished from the ordinary use of the word rent
by being applied solely to payments for the use of land itself—must
be paid by the owner, and cannot be shifted by him onto the user. To
explain in another way the reason given in the text: Price is not determined
by the will of the seller or the will of the buyer, but by the equation
of demand and supply, and therefore, as to things constantly demanded
and constantly produced, rests at a point determined by the cost of production—whatever
tends to increase the cost of bringing fresh quantities of such articles
to the consumer increasing price by checking supply, and whatever tends
to reduce such cost decreasing price by increasing supply. Thus taxes on
wheat or tobacco or cloth add to the price that the consumer must pay, and
thus the cheapening in the cost of producing steel, which improved processes
have made in recent years, has greatly reduced the price of steel. But land
has no cost of production, since it is created by God, not produced by man.
Its price, therefore, is fixed—1 (monopoly rent) where land is held in close
monopoly, by what the owners can extract from the users under penalty of
deprivation and consequently of starvation, and amounts to all that common
labor can earn on it beyond what is necessary to life; 2 (economic rent
proper) where there is no special monopoly, by what the particular land
will yield to common labor over and above what may be had by like expenditure
and exertion on land having no special advantage and for which no rent
is paid; and 3 (speculative rent, which is a species of monopoly rent, telling
particularly in selling-price) by the expectation of future increase of
value from social growth and improvement, which expectation, causing landowners
to withhold land at present prices, has the same effect as combination.

Taxes on land
values or economic rent can therefore never be shifted by the landowner
to the land-user, since they in no wise increase the demand for land
or enable landowners to check supply by withholding land from use. Where
rent depends on mere monopolization—a case I mention because rent may
in this way be demanded for the use of land even before economic or natural
rent arises—the taking by taxation of what the landowners were able to
extort from labor could not enable them to extort any more, since laborers
if not left enough to live on will die. So in the case of economic rent
proper, to take from the landowners the premiums they receive would in
no way increase the superiority of their land and the demand for it. While
so far as price is affected by speculative rent, to compel the landowners
to pay taxes on the value of land, whether they were getting any income
from it or not, would make it more difficult for them to withhold land
from use; and to tax the full value would not merely destroy the power,
but the desire, to do so.

Note 2: Letter addressed
to the Clergy and Laity of the Diocese of Meath, Ireland, April 2, 1881.Note 3:
To facilitate references the paragraphs of the Encyclical
are indicated by number.

Note 4: Let
anyone who wishes visit this Diocese and see with his own eyes the
vast and boundless extent of the fairest land in Europe that has been
ruthlessly depopulated since the commencement of the present century,
and which is now abandoned to a loneliness and solitude more depressing
than that of the prairie or the wilderness. Thus has this land system actually
exercised the power of life and death on a vast scale, for which there
is no parallel even in the dark records of slavery.—Bishop Nulty's Letter
to the Clergy and Laity of the Diocese of Meath.

Note 5: Nor
should it be forgotten that the investigator, the philosopher, the teacher,
the artist, the poet, the priest, though not engaged in the production
of wealth, are not only engaged in the production of utilities and satisfactions
to which the production of wealth is only a means, but by acquiring
and diffusing knowledge, stimulating mental powers and elevating the
moral sense, may greatly increase the ability to produce wealth. For man
does not live by bread alone.... He who by any exertion of mind or body
adds to the aggregate of enjoyable wealth, increases the sum of human
knowledge, or gives to human life higher elevation or greater fullness—he
is in the large meaning of the words a "producer", a "working man", a "laborer",
and is honestly earning honest wages. But he who, without doing aught
to make mankind richer, wiser, better, happier, lives on the toil of others—he,
no matter by what name of honor he may be called or how lustily the priests
of Mammon may swing their censers before him, is in the last analysis but
a beggar-man or a thief.—Protection or Free Trade, pp. 74–75